Migration Issues from Microsoft Test Manager

Thursday, July 15, 2021
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Microsoft Test Manager is essentially EOL and after evaluating over a dozen test case management tools we settled on SpiraTest, especially since the migration tool looked promising. It does a lot of stuff, but there are some limitations. Did anyone overcome these problems? Here is what I ran into so far

- tool created test case parameters, but did not copy any of the values....we got the source code and Inflectra fixed that.

- Spira's test case parameter values cannot be longer than 255 characters. On migration the test case gets created, but only those parameters are added until one exceeds the 255 character limit for its value. If that happens none of the test steps are added.

- Spira does not really allow for multiple test case parameter values. I know there is a way, but that should be an option in the Test Parameter dialog. For each set of values the test is run multiple times. Test Manager calls that iterations. A HUGE help when needing to test with the same steps but different predefined values. Alas, the migration tool can only bring over one value (and that because we fixed it) requiring us to flatten out all test cases in Test Manager before migration

- Migration tool has no concept of Test Manager's referenced test cases. in Test Manager one test case can be added to various folders. Test runs are tracked separately. So during migration the references are ignored. Should instead just go ahead and create a new test case in Spira. At least it gets logged so that it can be fixed manually.

- Migration is slow. I have over 70k test cases to move over and have to do that in chunks running the migration tool on multiple VMs

- Small issue, the log is incomplete. Once the migration is done the last bit of log is never written to file.

- Migration tool does not import users when the user name contains a comma. So Last, First causes migration to fail right away. Workaround was to not import the users.

- Tool does not bring over any custom fields except for Area and Status. I had our automation engineer write a script that stuffs the values into Spira, but that is really something a migration tool should do.

The migration tool is works and brings a lot of things over nicely, but whoever crafted the requirements for this tool had not much knowledge of how Test Manager works. Test Manager isn't a popular tool, so changes will come after we migrated.

2 Replies
Thursday, July 15, 2021
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re: DavidKrings Thursday, July 15, 2021

Thank you for your feedback. I'm sorry that the MTM importer did not completely migrate over all the data exactly as you would have liked.

As you mentioned, the MTM tool is not as widely used as some others, so the importer is not as sophisticated as the importers we have for HP ALM, TestRail, TestLink, etc. Also there are some differences between how SpiraTest and MTM work, so the importer has to make some assumptions and simplifications to get the data to come over. There are also some limitations in the MTM API which also resulted in some of the design choices.

We have logged the items you raised, thank you for raising them. If we get more users migrating from MTM we will be happy to use those items to improve the importer as you suggest. Sorry we were not able to get them implemented in time for your import.

Regards

David

Friday, July 23, 2021
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re: inflectra.david Thursday, July 15, 2021

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