How do I pause a test case and move on to running the next test case?

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Here is the exact scenario that one of the customer asked:

Testers want to pause some test case and want to resume it later point of time since they don’t have the required data to proceed with the test case and they don’t want to mark them as pass/fail.

Here is the brief description:

1. Test cases are in active state

2. Running the first test case and stopped in between since lack of data.

3. Return to MTM, 1st test case will be “In progress”

4. Select 2nd test case and run that with-out disturbing the state of first test case. (But here MTM prompt to save/don’t save, on click of save, MTM marks the test case as pass. )

5. Later point of time, when he got data he want to resume the paused first test case. 

unfortunately MTM doesn't support the step 4 here. When the first test case is “In Progress” and want to execute 2nd test case, MTM pop-up a dialog asking for save/don't save. On click on save, saves the result and marks the test case as pass. 

The closest thing that tester can do is to mark that test case as blocked (after going through some steps, say step#1 as passed) and pick it up next time.

The Test result will show that certain steps (step#1) were marked passed, but the test case was marked as Blocked. However, the next time around will be a new run and will have to start again from step#1 – you can not start over from middle of a test case.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2011
    The lack of this feature has been the #1 complaint by users at my organization and is blocking us from transitioning to TFS/MTM.  I really hope this is addressed in MTM vNext.

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2011
    Same here, I've have started writing a custom test runner with suspend/resume functionality (among other things) to compensate this for a large client.

  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2011
    Hi Jörg - I am working on adding something similar to my TFS Test Steps Editor (teststepseditor.codeplex.com). Interested in collaborating?

  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2011
    What is the test scenario in which someone would launch a test case in which the test cannot possibly complete because it is missing something? That seems like designing an automobile with a tank full of fuel but no way to refill the fuel tank.

  • Anonymous
    July 24, 2011
    Boyd/Jorg/Aidan - can you guys please describe why you want this scenario to work? What is the exact requirement for this feature? That will help us understand this better to make a call on whether to stack this further up in our future releases backlog or not. Thanks

  • Anonymous
    July 27, 2011
    Hi Anu, Taken from social.msdn.microsoft.com/.../a96cf28b-818e-41de-aefa-8f861e2fbded This is what I am looking for-

  1. Tester is running test case, realises he has to pause the test case as he is waiting on same data flow, external activity or anything, or for some data which will flow only next day. He mark the few initial steps as pass and the step which requires a wait, puts up a comment there.
  2. Now he knows the test case will be complete the other day only, he doesnt want to wait and should run the other test cases in the Suite.  He runs them meanwhile
  3. Now next morning he wants to resume the test case which he was running the other night from the point he left.

  • Anonymous
    July 27, 2011
    Like it is explained in the above comment, it happens everyday in testing. Most of the time, we cannot finish a test run from start to end in one go in real world.At the same time we cannot restart the test right from start every time we pause and move on to the next test.

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2012
    Hi Anutthara, I concur with the other posters. In our current environment, we have multiple processes that we launch to constitute a test case. Very often one of processes fails (wrong code, wrong stored procedure etc.). We have the ability to pick up the next time after the developers fix that problem. However, with MTM, that's impossible. We have to start all over again and log the collected data for the previous steps even though they don't really  have to be re-executed. Please implement this ability to just "pause" a test if needed and resume from where we left off the previous time. Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    February 16, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2012
    Is this feature still not implemented? My customers are asking for the exact same thing now. We are using TFS2010 / MTM2010.

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2014
    The comment has been removed