We are excited to announce the availability of a new Spira QE Coverage extension for Microsoft Azure DevOps. Developed in collaboration with one of our valued customers, this new extension makes it easier than ever for development teams using Azure DevOps (ADO) to see the test coverage and execution status of their requirements without leaving their familiar development environment.
The new extension builds on Inflectra's existing integration between Spira and Azure DevOps, adding an embedded quality engineering panel directly to ADO work items. Developers, business analysts, product owners, and engineering managers can now see which test cases cover a particular requirement, whether those tests have passed or failed, and whether the requirement is ready for release.
This latest enhancement further strengthens Spira's position as a powerful alternative to Microsoft Azure Test Plans, allowing organizations to retain Azure DevOps for their development activities while benefiting from Spira's dedicated test management, requirements traceability, and quality assurance capabilities.
Bringing Test Coverage Directly into Azure DevOps
One of the challenges facing engineering teams that use separate development and test management tools is maintaining visibility into software quality. Developers may manage their user stories, features, and bugs in Azure DevOps, while QA teams manage their test cases, executions, and results in a dedicated testing platform.
Although this separation allows each team to use the tools best suited to its needs, it can make it harder for developers and product owners to understand whether a particular requirement has been adequately tested.
Our new Azure DevOps extension addresses this challenge by embedding test coverage information directly into the ADO work item interface. Whenever a work item is linked to a corresponding requirement in Spira, the extension can display its test coverage and execution results without requiring the user to open another application.
The extension provides a color-coded coverage bar showing the status of the associated test cases, including Passed, Failed, Not Run, Blocked, Caution, and N/A. It also displays a detailed list of the covering test cases, including their IDs, names, and latest execution statuses. Users can click on an individual test case to open the corresponding record in Spira for further investigation.
This means that a product owner reviewing a user story or a developer preparing for a release can immediately see whether the associated testing has been completed successfully, identify outstanding failures, and make better-informed decisions about release readiness.
Building on Our Existing Azure DevOps Integration
The new extension is designed to work alongside Inflectra's existing Spira integration with Azure DevOps, which already provides bidirectional synchronization of requirements, tasks, and defects between the two systems.
With this integration, teams can continue to manage development work items inside Azure DevOps while synchronizing their requirements into Spira, where test cases can be created, organized, executed, and linked to the requirements they verify.
The new extension takes this integration a step further by making the results of those testing activities visible directly inside Azure DevOps. It automatically detects the links created by the existing synchronization service, retrieves the corresponding test coverage information from Spira using its REST API, and presents the results within the work item.
Importantly, there is no need to manually map every work item to its corresponding test cases. Once the integration and extension have been configured, the coverage information can be accessed directly from the synchronized ADO work items.
The result is a more seamless experience in which developers and QA engineers can use their preferred tools while sharing a common understanding of requirements, test coverage, and software quality.
A Powerful Alternative to Azure Test Plans
For organizations already using Azure DevOps, Microsoft Azure Test Plans is an obvious choice for managing testing activities. However, not every organization wants to use the same vendor for its development and test management needs, particularly when more advanced requirements traceability, flexible test management, integrated defect tracking, and comprehensive quality reporting are important.
With Spira, organizations can use Azure DevOps for work item management, source control, and CI/CD pipelines while adopting a dedicated quality management platform for their testing activities.
Spira provides a comprehensive environment for managing manual and automated tests, requirements coverage, regression testing, defect management, and end-to-end traceability. Its integrations with a wide range of test automation frameworks and CI/CD tools make it possible to consolidate test results from different sources into a single system of record.
The new extension eliminates one of the potential disadvantages of using a separate test management platform: the need for developers and product owners to leave Azure DevOps to understand the testing status of their requirements.
Organizations can now take advantage of Spira's broader test management capabilities while maintaining quality visibility within the Azure DevOps interface that their development teams already use.
Bringing the Same Experience to Both Jira and Azure DevOps
This release also represents an important milestone in Inflectra's commitment to supporting heterogeneous development toolchains.
Inflectra already provides a Spira QA Coverage add-on for Atlassian Jira, enabling Jira users to view requirement-level test coverage and the execution status of their associated test cases directly inside Jira issues.
With the introduction of the new Azure DevOps extension, Inflectra now offers a similar embedded quality assurance experience across two of the industry's most widely used development and work item management platforms.
This gives organizations greater flexibility to select the development tools that best meet their needs without sacrificing visibility into testing activities. It is especially valuable for larger enterprises that use both Jira and Azure DevOps across different teams, departments, or projects.
Rather than forcing every team to adopt the same development platform, Spira can serve as a centralized system of record for testing and quality assurance while delivering relevant quality information directly into the tools used by individual engineering teams.
Developed in Collaboration with Our Customers
One of the most exciting aspects of this release is that the new extension was developed in collaboration with one of our customers, demonstrating the value of working closely with the organizations that use our products every day.
This collaboration reflects Inflectra's commitment to practical innovation driven by real-world engineering challenges. By listening to customers and working together to solve their problems, we can continue to extend the capabilities of our platform and make quality engineering more accessible across the software development lifecycle.
As development teams increasingly adopt AI-assisted and agentic software delivery workflows, maintaining clear visibility into requirements, verification, and release readiness becomes even more important. Integrations like this help ensure that quality remains visible throughout the software development process, rather than being isolated in a separate testing activity.
Getting Started with Spira QE Coverage for Azure DevOps
The new extension is available from the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace and can be installed into an Azure DevOps organization.
To use the extension, organizations need to configure the existing Spira–Azure DevOps synchronization and establish the connection between the extension and their Spira instance. A project administrator can then configure the connection settings, after which the extension automatically identifies synchronized requirements and displays their associated test coverage.
Learn more and get started:
- Install the Spira QE Coverage extension from Visual Studio Marketplace
- Explore Spira's Azure DevOps integration capabilities
- Learn about Spira's integration with Atlassian Jira
With this release, Inflectra continues to deliver on its vision of integrated quality engineering, enabling organizations to combine the best development and testing tools without losing the traceability, visibility, and control needed to deliver reliable software.