BRAND NEW!!! Test Smell Plugin for VSTS DevOps

Test Smell Detection improves your manual test cases. The automatic detection of test smells helps making your test suite easy to understand and easy to maintain. In addition, the automatic detection also leads to consistent reproducible test results.

The best way to find test smells is our Qualicen Scout. Scout can detect test smells in textual test descriptions automatically. Configured once, it immediately shows where you can improve your test descriptions.

What kind of improvements you ask? Well, there is a wide variety of so called “Test Smells” Scout can automatically detect! Test smells are words, phrases, or language constructs that are not good for your test quality.  For example, …

• ambiguous phrases in your test descriptions (a threat to reproducible test results).
• sentences/paragraphs that are difficult to comprehend (prevents that your colleagues ask: “eh, what?”)
• tests having multiple flows (shouldn’t a test focus on just one case?).
• steps that have been copied between test cases (super annoying to keep in sync when things change).
• and many more …

Quality defects have to be removed as early as possible

To have a high-quality test suite, a key success factor is to remove quality defects as early as possible. Based on our experience, the more quality defects a test suite has, the less effective the suite becomes (effective in terms of finding product defects). Besides, the loss of effectiveness the large smelly test suites become a burden to maintain. Sound familiar? Yes, technical debt exists for test cases too.

We deal with large and smelly test suites all the time. At our client projects, we are dealing with this by setting clear quality goals depending on the history of test project.

Introducing: Qualicen Test Smell plugin for Azure DevOps

We strive to continues improve our products. And one issue with the combination of a Test-Management System with Qualicen Scout was the inherent fact that there where two separate tools.  Users did not always switch tools in order to actively hunt down quality defects in their tests.

So, to make quality defects even easier to fix, we developed a Scout-plugin for Azure DevOps (also known as  Microsoft Visual Studio Online, aka VSTS, Team Foundation Server or TFS). Our Scout-plugin shows you test smells directly in the Azure DevOps UI. Resulting in a instant feedback cycle. Your write, you save, you get feedback, you fix, you save, you get the point. No more switching of tools, no more smelly test cases.

So far, our users just love this new plugin. Do you want to check it out? Let me know via mail or directly and we’re happy to set it up for you.

TL;DR

• It is important to improve test cases as early as possible (technical debt)
• The test smell plugin for Azure DevOps helps you to identify quality defects immediately, while writing and editing your test cases.