Is it practical to share a project between testers without Source Control

Option B: We are mad not to use source control.  :D



For your case, I would recommend Perforce.  (I don't use it now, as I have TFS 2010, but it was good in the past)

It comes with 2 free seat licenses. and was easy to setup.  However, go with any version control you are comfortable with.





Essentially, since you have it shared, you are also facing the risk of accidental deletion, from two sources, Source code can change with no clear idea of who did it, locked files, as well as the various issues you listed above.  Though I'm sure you have a backup anyway, if not, this will give you another location to do this from.



Another options is DropBox, of SkyDrive, which is sort of like a shared drive, but everytime that you save, it copies the changes onto a server, and then onto any other systems paying attention.  It works pretty well, and should prevent file locks.  They also have file Versioning or backup as a paid option, but otherwise they are free upto 2 gigs.



Typically, you can both operate with full editing rights, then do a diff to see what changes were in.



This will also give you your version control, and a separate backup.

I often run into the MDS issue you are describing when different installations of TestComplete have different extensions installed.  TestComplete stores some information about extensions in the MDS file and if you share that file between two boxes with different extension setups, you will clobber the MDS file every time.  It's a dumb thing I wish SmartBear would fix.

Dan, you use TFS 2010 for source control?



We have TFS 2010 here and about a year ago I tried to use the source control on a TC project suite. I remember spending several hours individually checking in every separate file in the project suite when I first set it up. Also when closing the project suite at the end of a working session there seemed to be an awful lot of checking in (every new visualizer image as I recall) and worrying error messages.



Do you find using TFS 2010 for TC source control OK?

We actually use Visual SourceSafe (I know, I know).  Once I got all the different installations of TestComplete using the same set of extensions, I had no further problems.

Bert,



I've not thought about TC extensions before. Are those the items shown in the FILE > INSTALL EXTENSIONS window?

To avoid the .mds warning messages, do I need to make sure that all TC users have the same extensions listed, or the same extensions active?



Thanks, Jim

Another thing to be sure of  is to uncheck the "Map Object Names Automatically" box from Tools -> Options -> Engines -> Name Mapping. A more manual approach is needed to maintain the name mapping in a multi-user environment, regardless of source control.

Same extensions active.  What happened in my case was that I had turned of a slew of them because I didn't use them to speed up performance and another developer hadn't resulting in a difference in the MDS file every time we checked into source control.