Added Manual Test Plan support to my Azure DevOps Cross-Platform Release notes Task

I have just release 3.46.4 of my Azure DevOps Cross-Platform release Notes task which adds support for generating release notes based on the results of Azure DevOps Test Plans.

There has been support in the task for automated tests, run as part of the build or release process, for a while. However, until this release, there was no way to generate release notes based on manual tests.

Manual Test results are now made available to the templating engine using two new objects:

• manualtests - the array of manual Test Plan runs associated with any of the builds linked to the release. This includes sub-objects detailing each test.
  Note: Test Runs are also available under the builds array when the task is used in a release, for each build object there is a list of its manual tests as well commits and WI etc.
• manualTestConfigurations - the array of manual test configurations test have been run against.

The second object, to store the test configurations, is required because the test results only contain the ID of the configuration used, not any useful detail such as a name or description. The extra object allows a lookup to be done if this information is required in the release notes e.g. if you have chosen to list out each test, and each test is run multiple times in a test run against different configurations e.g. UAt and Live

So you can now generate release notes with summaries of manual test runs

Using a template in this form

1## Manual Test Plans
2| Run ID | Name | State | Total Tests | Passed Tests |
3| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
4{{#forEach manualTests}}
5| [{{this.id}}]({{this.webAccessUrl}}) | {{this.name}} | {{this.state}} | {{this.totalTests}} | {{this.passedTests}} |
6{{/forEach}}

Or detailing out all the individual test

with a template like this

1## Manual Test Plans with test details
2{{#forEach manualTests}}
3### [{{this.id}}]({{this.webAccessUrl}}) {{this.name}} - {{this.state}}
4| Test | Outcome | Configuration |
5| - | - | - |
6{{#forEach this.TestResults}}
7| {{this.testCaseTitle}} | {{this.outcome}} | {{#with (lookup_a_test_configuration ../../manualTestConfigurations this.configuration.id)}} {{this.name}} {{/with}} |
8{{/forEach}}
9{{/forEach}}