If you are Tester, I’m sure you have been in these situations before or at least one of them.

a) You are asked to test the last changes done by the developers and it’s hard to tell how their code impact the application specially if many of their changes affect many parts of the application and not just specific part.

b) Sometimes developer may change something in a base class that is used by many functions in the application and he/she can’t tell you what you are really supposed to test.

c) After several builds and releases you or the customer finds a bug that was supposed to be fixed & tested in an old build, and after investigation, your team found that it was due to a change in an old function that was reused in the new feature in the app, but the written code affects the old feature.

With Test Impact you can overcome all the above situations.

Because simply what “Test impact” do is see what parts of the code have been called by the test cases you run. So when a new build is done and this build has code changes to the code that was already tested by test cases. You will get notified which test cases you should run again to verify those changes.

Imagine that you have about more than 400 old passed test cases and you get notified that you should run 14 test cases due to the latest code changes. I’m sure you will love that

Here is how you do it:

1) You need to open the test plan properties then open the test settings or make a new one

2) Then on the data and diagnostics tab you need to choose the Test Impact then click finish

3) Don’t forget to always run your test cases while this test setting is used.

a. If you only need it with some test cases then don’t make this test setting as the default in the test plan and then when you run the test case you can choose run with options and choose the test settings you want.

4) Now after you run your test cases and developers changes a lot of code and you wish to know what to test. In Microsoft Test Manager, select the Track tab to open the track activity. By default, the Queries window is loaded.

5) Select the Assign Build link to view the available builds and the impacted work items between the selected build and the current build.

6) Select the latest build and click on view to see if there were any BUG to verify or user story that was developed to start to run its test cases

7) But to see the scenario we are talking about we need to click on Recommended Tests tab to see the test cases that should rerun again based on the code changed

8) Then select the test cases and click on Rest to active.

Summary:

By applying Test Impact in the data and diagnostics tab of the test settings, this feature helps you decide which test cases you should rerun based on changes made to an application.