Team Foundation Server (TFS) and its software-as-a-service counterpart Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) are widely used application lifecycle management (ALM) and test management tools. They offer many great facilities to create tests, manage test plans, and execute them.  Consequently, many of our clients as well as prospective customers wanted to use our test improvement software Test Scout along with TFS/VSTS to improve the test case quality. So, here is the question that we always face: How do we get the data from a testing tool into the Test Scout? As always in life, there is a straightforward and a fancy solution. Let me show you what I mean.

First: a simple integration

Test Scout is able to process almost any kind of text format. So, integrating test management tools such as TFS/VSTS is quite straightforward: For each test management tool, we created exports, which we imported into the Scout. For HP ALM, for example, we use a simple script to create a database dump containing all currently existing test cases. We then automatically imported and processed this data in Test Scout to evaluate the test case quality. Since Test Scout keeps versions of each import in its database, the history of all test cases is available in Test Scout. Therefore, all features, such as comparing different versions of test cases and historical development of test cases still works out of the box.