E (Visual Studio ALM Glossary)

This glossary defines key terms that are used in the Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Help.

• elapsed exclusive time
  Time spent in function, excluding time spent in items it calls. See also: elapsed inclusive time

• elapsed inclusive time
  Time spent in function and items it calls. See also: elapsed exclusive time

• embedding relationship
  A domain relationship in which the links form a tree of paths by which each object can be uniquely identified.

• end user
  The person who actually uses a solution, as opposed to the customer, who pays for it.

• entry criteria
  States of being that must be present before an effort can begin successfully.

• entry point
  An interface provided by the system that might be used to gain access to the assets or resources of a system.

• environment
  A set of roles that are required to run a specific application and the machines to be used for each role.

• environment snapshot
  A file-based representation of the state, disk data, and configuration of all virtual machines in an environment at a specific point in time.

• environment viewer
  An application that lets users connect to and interact with the virtual machines in a virtual environment. You can also use the environment viewer to take a snapshot of the environment. See also: environment snapshot.

• ETW
  See: Event Trace for Windows

• Event Trace for Windows (ETW)
  A lightweight reporting infrastructure that is part of Microsoft Windows and used by several major Microsoft technologies to report information.

• exception event
  A diagnostic event in IntelliTrace that occurs within the Visual Studio Debugger. Exception events include exceptions thrown, exceptions caught, and unhandled exceptions.

• exclusive time
  The total time spent inside this function or module, excluding time in functions or modules called from this function.

• exclusive transitions
  Number of transitions between user (ring 3) and kernel mode (ring 0) in function, excluding transitions in items it calls.

• exit criteria
  A set of criteria that a product or service must meet before a particular milestone is complete. The presence of exit criteria signal the end of a successful effort.

• experimental build
  A separate instance of Visual Studio that is stored in a special registry hive so that developers can to easily and consistently debug and deploy solutions in an isolated work environment.

• exploratory testing
  The testing of a product without a set of tests defined in advanced. Testers performing exploratory testing take on a persona and perform the tasks that persona would perform.

• extraction rule
  A rule that copies a string from a Web test response and puts it in the test context for use later in the test. For example, you can extract a form field value from a response and use it as a parameter value in a subsequent request. There is a predefined set of rules that comes with the product and additional extraction rules can be created if needed.