Bulk Export Import Test Cases to Azure DevOps Test Plans using CSV file

Praphulla Nagaraj

As a user of Azure DevOps Test Plans or TFS Test Management for manual testing, from a long time everyone including me had a wish, that copy of test cases from excel or csv file along with test steps to Azure DevOps/TFS should be provided. Now that wait is over, Microsoft has recently announced this most requested feature in Azure DevOps world Bulk Export Import Test Cases to Azure DevOps Test Plans using CSV file. Using this option, you can export the existing test cases to Excel CSV file, make changes to the CSV file and then import the file back into the suite. Not only that you can bulk add new test cases along with steps and expected results. Let’s see how to use this feature.

1. Once you log into the Azure DevOps project go to Test Plans and choose one of the test plans or create a new one. Post that when you open the plan you can see 3 tabs “Define”, “Execute” and “Charts”. Under Define tab you will see up and down arrows, that is import and export options.

2. Create a csv file and add the required column names like below. The column names are mandatory fields required to import test cases.

3. Once the columns are defined, now add the test cases along with steps and expected results and you define other field values. As shown in the below image the ID column should be left blank, the Area path should match to the project Area Paths and to assign the testcase to users, you can either use email-id or username

4. Now we are ready to import the 2 test cases. Go to the test plan E2E Plan and click on Module 1 test suite. In Define tab click on “import test case from CSV” (up arrow) option.

5. Click on Choose file, then select the “Test Cases.csv” file and click on open.

6. Finally clock on “Import” button to create the new test cases

7. Upon successful verification the test cases will be imported as shown below. You will see message on how many test cases created or updated and in Define tab you can see the test cases being created. Since 2 new test cases were import the message shows 0 test cases updated and 2 test cases created.

8. To export the test case from the suite, click on “Export test cases to CSV” (down arrow) option and the csv file will be downloaded to your machine.

9. Open the excel file to check the details. The file name will be Test Plan + Suite name, ID column will have the work item ID and “Assigned To” has the correct user even though you used two different option username and email-ID, it is parsed correctly

10. You can import hundreds of test cases easily; I have tested for more the 2 thousand test cases and it was imported in 3-4 minutes.

You learnt how to import and export test cases along with step action, step expected and column details. You can also include custom fields in the CSV file, if any defined in the test case.