Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
PractiTest
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
PractiTest is presented as a cloud-based test management tool that provides its customers with an end-to-end system to meet testing and QA needs. It is described by the vendor as flexible but methodological, enabling organizations to ensure visibility and communication at all levels. The solution aims to help users and project development teams streamline and manage their testing processes, while providing management with a clear and simple view of their project status at all times.
$39
user
Pricing
Azure DevOps Services
PractiTest
Editions & Modules
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
ADO is well suited for the visibility of day-to-day tasks and responsibilities as well as things such as Features, user stories, etc. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any scenario where it might not be well suited, as you can customize ADO to your liking to a degree.
PractiTest works GREAT as a test case repository. It is very easy to gather metrics, filter, and sort based on custom fields. We were able to work with the API to pull our automation results in as well. The support team is always very quick with their responses and monitors the "in-app chat." They are very open to answering questions, providing best practice materials, and looking for additional feedback. If you already have a central location for all of your test cases and testing needs, then I guess you probably wouldn't need to add another. However, PractiTest has high capability and potential, so if it's set up properly you can easily save time managing your tests.
Flexible Requirements Hierarchy Management: AZDO makes it easy to track items such as features or epics as a flat list, or as a hierarchy in which you can track the parent-child relationship.
Fast Data Entry: AZDO was designed to facilitate quick data entry to capture work items quickly, while still enabling detailed capture of acceptance criteria and item properties.
Excel Integration: AZDO stands out for its integration with MS Excel, which enables quick updates for bulk items.
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
Azure DevOps is a powerful, complex cloud application. As such there are a number of things it does great and something where there is room for improvement. One of those areas would be in usability. In my opinion it relies too much on search. There is no easy way to view all projects or to group them in a logical way. You need to search for everything.
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
The chat button is available to anyone who logs into PractiTest. In my experience, the support has always been very quick, very friendly, and very thorough. They make sure that your question is answered in a way that you understand it. They also provide documentation of best practices so you are never left hanging on what to do next.
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
I've used many different Test Case Repository tools, and while each of them has its perks, I like the capabilities of PractiTest best. When creating a test in qTest for example, you can only input information into the fields provided, and you have everything set up in a folder tree structure. With PractiTest, we are able to create custom fields and filter our tests based on those fields to provide more accurate information in a readily available format while quickly searching for the filter instead of through a folder tree. TestRail did not appear to meet our needs as a company. It just didn't have the potential that we found with PractiTest. Zephyr for example worked seamlessly with Jira, which is really nice since that is what we use for the most part. However since we cater to many different clients, we needed an external Test Case repository so we could use something that wasn't tied to 1 Jira instance.
