Overview
SpiraTest comes with a free data-synchronization plugin that will allow you to seamlessly integrate test management with your Azure DevOps environment (both cloud and server). The integration with Azure DevOps is seamless to the end-user and features full bi-directional data synchronization of incidents and optional synchronization of requirements and tasks.
Streamlined Configuration
State and Reasons
One of the unusual features of Azure DevOps (a heritage from its days as Team Foundation Server or TFS) is that work items in Azure DevOps (hereafter ADO) can have both a high-level status, called a State and a lower-level status called a Reason. Since SpiraTest uses a single status field to drive its workflow, the integration between SpiraTest and ADO is designed to let you map each SpiraTest status to a combination of ADO State+Reason as you can see below:
However, based on feedback from our customers, we have found that in some cases they would prefer to ignore the lower-level reason codes in ADO and simply map each of the SpiraTest statuses to the high-level work item State only. With the new version of the integration plugin, this is now possible:
You can even mix and match the mapping to have some statuses mapped to States, and other statuses mapped to State + Reason combinations!
Area Field Mapping
Microsoft ADO has a built-in field called the Area:
which lets you describe which area of the system the work item relates to. This is a hierarchical path in ADO which you can map to a list custom property in SpiraTest.
Previously, you had to map each of these area values to the physical ID of the area in ADO. This works well for ADO Server, but is not so easy with ADO cloud because the IDs are hidden.
So, with the updated plugin you can instead map the Area values to the path in ADO instead:
Giving you the choice of using either Area ID or Area Path.
Enhancements for General Users
When you log a new incident in SpiraTest, it includes the various details of the bug to be synchronized with ADO. There is a special field in SpiraTest that is auto-populated by the synchronization service to display the corresponding Azure DevOps Work Item ID for each incident (or task/requirement) in SpiraTest:
However, we have added in this new version of the synchronization plugin, a new hyperlink directly from the incident, requirement or task in SpiraTest, with the corresponding work item in ADO:
This will take you directory to the work item in ADO:
For symmetry, we also add a hyperlink from the work item in ADO back to the incident in SpiraTest: