In Azure DevOps Test Plans (aka. Azure DevOps’s QA testing tools), Test Suites help you to keep your tests organized. But if you’re looking at your tests, it’s 0% obvious how to add a new Test Suite. Heck! You can’t even tell by looking that Test Suites even exist in the tool. So how do you add new test suites in Azure DevOps Test Plans?
What are these things for?
Just to make sure we’re all on-board with the same terms and definitions, here’s quick reminder. Azure DevOps “Test Plans” is the name of the product. Inside of the product there’s also another thing called a “Test Plan” and that represents everything about your testing effort for a given team and/or iteration. Test Plans are the top-level item in the Azure DevOps Test Plans product/tool. Test Cases represent the actual description of what you’re going to test and the test steps for how you plan to do those tests plus the expected outcomes. The tool is perfectly happy to have you put Test Cases directly in the root of your Test Plans — basically, it’s perfectly happy to have you toss everything in the same bucket — but that can get messy quickly. In order to control the mess, you can use Test Suites. Test suites come in 3 forms: requirements-based test suites, query-based test suites, and static test suites.
Requirements-based Suites organize test cases per requirement. Query-based Suites let you define a work item query to select the relevant test cases. Static suites are essentially just like a folder and they let you manually add test cases to that folder (suite).
Add a Test Suite to a Test Plan
Adding a Test Suite is simple but it’s hidden. Go to your Test Plan and then hover your mouse to the right of the Test Plan’s name as shown in the image below.
You should see three dots appear. Click on that three dot icon and then you should see the context menu for the Test Plan. One of the options in the Test Plan should be New Suite. Inside of the New Suite menu is a submenu for creating a Static, Requirement-based, or Query-based Test Suite.
See what I mean? It’s easy to do but it’s 100% hidden.
I hope this helps.
-Ben
Need help with Azure DevOps Test Plans? Trying to wrap your head around Agile Testing techniques? Not sure where QA testing and QA testers fit in to Scrum, Agile, and Kanban? We can help. Drop us a line at info@benday.com.
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