Tuesday, 8 July 2014

Test Suite and Test Plan customizations in TFS 2013 Update 3 – synergic work between development and testing

IMHO the most exciting feature of Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 3, among all its goodness, is the migration of Test Suites and Test Plans to plain Work Item Types – and the reason is pretty simple.

Despite all the effort spent, developers and testers still had a tiny line which kept splitting them and their worlds:

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Which eventually led to limited shared information (pinned items on the Web Access) between them. Which was a cause of pain and frustration, especially among the testers. Using Tags was a way of sorting it, but to be fair not properly the best…

But right now all the testing artefacts are Work Item Types – Test Plans, Suites and Cases – so you can query them and, mostly important, you can easily add custom fields, rules and workflows like with the existing WITs.

For example, I might have Test Suites with a specific Feature Area (potentially reused across other Work Item Types) as well as a Planned Release field. I can easily add them to the Test Suite Work Item Type:

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The cool stuff is that all of these are now queryable!

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…and obviously, pinnable to the team’s home page:

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That’s why it is way easier for testers now to access and share relevant information.

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