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TestPulse is read-only by design. It reads Test Plans, results and work items to build reports and signals, and it writes nothing on its own. Every write in the product is triggered by an explicit gesture on your part, and there are exactly three of them.

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What “read-only” means here

  • No background writes, ever. Opening a report, a dashboard or the coverage tab changes nothing in your project.
  • No status changes, comments, tags or edits to work items TestPulse did not create itself.
  • 100% client-side: reports are built in your browser. No backend — no data ever leaves your Azure DevOps tenant.
  • The on-work-item signals read live and change nothing.

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The three places it writes

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1. Coverage Builder — creates plans and suites

Creates Test Plans and requirement-based suites from a set of requirements, behind a confirmation dialog. Create-only: it never overwrites or deletes, warns on a name collision, and reports partial failures honestly. Scope: vso.test_write.

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2. Exploratory testing — creates work items you asked for

While running an exploratory session, and after closing it, you can file a Bug or a Test Case from what you observed. Closing a session also creates a Task carrying the whole session: report, captures, files, and links to everything you filed. Captures and files you attach are uploaded to Azure DevOps as attachments. All of it is created, never modified: TestPulse links the new work item to your story, it does not touch the story itself. Scope: vso.work_write.

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3. Session closure — sets the state of the Task it just created

When you close a session, an optional dialog offers to assign the tracking Task and give it an initial state. If Azure DevOps refuses to create the Task directly in that state — some processes do — TestPulse sets the state in a second step, once, and never retries. This is the only place in the product where a work item is modified after creation, and it is always the Task TestPulse created seconds earlier, in the same gesture. Skipping the dialog produces a Task byte-for-byte identical to the one built before this feature existed. Scope: vso.work_write.
TestPulse never modifies or deletes a work item, plan, suite or test case that existed before your gesture. The single post-creation write is bounded to the Task it just created, at your request.

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Permission scopes (reference)

Nothing reads comments or personal data beyond what a report needs. See the Permissions page for the full breakdown.

The Test Plans model

Plans, suites, cases, points.

Capture and create

What exploratory testing files, and when.