Test Activity Excel Report

You can use the Test Activity report to help monitor the number of manual tests that the team has run over time. This report is available only after the team creates test plans and starts to run tests by using Microsoft Test Manager. For information about how to define test suites and test plans, see Plan Manual Tests using Team Web Access.

For information about how to access this report, see Excel reports.

Required permissions

To view the report, you must be assigned or belong to a group that has been assigned the Read permissions in SharePoint Products for the team project.

To modify or customize the report, you must be a member of the TfsWarehouseDataReaders security role in SQL Server Analysis Services. You must also be assigned or belong to a group that has been assigned the Members permissions in SharePoint Products for the team project. For more information, see Grant permissions to view or create reports in TFS.

Data in the report

You can use the Test Activity report to understand how well the team is completing tests. This report is based on a PivotChart that shows the most recent four weeks of data that was captured for test results and that is stored in the data warehouse.

Required activities for monitoring test activity

For the Test Activity report to be useful and accurate, the team must perform the following activities:

• Define test cases and test pans, and assign test cases to test plans.

• For manual tests, mark the results of each validation step in the test case as passed or failed.

  Important

  Testers must mark a test step with a status if it is a validation test step. The overall result for a test case reflects the status of all the test steps that were marked. Therefore, the test case will have a status of failed if any test step is marked as failed or not marked.

  For automated tests, each test case is automatically marked as passed or failed.

• (Optional) To support filtering, assign Iteration and Area paths to each test case.

Interpreting the report

You should expect the Test Activity report to vary depending on where you are in your product development cycle. Early iterations should show a gradual increase in the number of manual test cases that have been run.

You can review the report to answer to the following questions:

• Is the trend of manual tests that the team is running consistently increasing?

• Do you identify any spikes in the test activity that you cannot account for?

The Test Activity report indicates the results for each test case run for each test configuration and for all test plans. Spikes that might occur may be early indicators of problems in either the test activity or the quality of code that is being checked in.

You might want to check the status of recent builds, bug status, and code churn to determine whether the metrics for each of these factors can help explain the changes in test activity.

Updating and customizing the report

You can update the Test Activity report by opening it in Microsoft Excel and changing the filter options for the PivotTable report. You can customize this report to support other views, as the following table describes.

For more information about how to work with and customize PivotTable and PivotChart reports, see the following pages on the Microsoft Web site:

• Ways to customize PivotTable reports

• Edit or remove a workbook from Excel Services

• Publish a workbook to Excel Services

• Save a file to a SharePoint library or another Web location

See Also

Other Resources

Excel reports