Oi! What happened to my test results???

Hi Guys, I’ve been busy working on an agile project in the city using VS and TFS 2010 and thought I would share one of my experiences as we stood to lose some very valuable information as a result of a default option that is not that obvious from the get go! I have reported the issue to MS and they are going to change the default option in future releases.

First, a little bit of history with the project, we were experiencing late delivery of builds or incomplete builds that could only have minimal testing applied to them, so we didn’t notice any real problems at first. Then we started getting into high levels of testing and one of my testers came to me and explained that one of the tests he had executed before in the Test Manager was now showing as “Active” (meaning needs to be executed) which was a bit odd :( When we looked into it, it wasn’t just that one test, there was loads of them (but not all) that had gone walkabout :o(

After a lot of digging around in all kinds of places, I decided to check the build definition that we were using and noticed something I hadn’t noticed before…..the retention policy, it was set to keep only the last 10 successful builds! I was onto something!! It appears that the default (certainly under the MSF for Agile template) was to delete everything INCLUDING TEST RESULTS!!! The good news was that we hadn’t lost too much and the option can be modified to delete everything else but the test results (screenshots below).


This is the build definition, please note the "Specify what to Delete" option in the drop down.




Here, you can uncheck the Test Results check box to ensure that they don't get deleted along with the build.

I would recommend to everyone that they take a look at their build definitions and modify them appropriately to avoid getting into this situation. If you have any questions, then please feel free to comment here, tweet me @dannycrone or even use ye olde email address dan_crone@nfocus.co.uk :)