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Scripted test cases don’t catch everything. The Explore tab, on the work item form, lets an analyst or tester run a full exploratory session from the user story itself — take notes, capture and annotate any screen, and turn findings into work items — then archives the whole thing back into Azure DevOps as a queryable Task.

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Start a session in one screen

From a user story, open Explore and start: a charter is pre-filled with the story’s title, with an optional timer and a free campaign tag. Area and Iteration are inherited from the story and editable through filterable tree pickers. As you work, add timestamped notes — they become the backbone of the session report and of any bug you create.

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Resilient by design

A session is meant to survive real life:
  • Debounced autosave (≤ 2 s) into the extension’s own storage — you don’t save by hand.
  • Automatic restore when you reopen the work item, with the elapsed time recomputed.
  • Discard asks for confirmation, and a failed close is non-destructive and replayable — a session is never silently lost or left in a phantom state. The status of a discarded session reads Abandoned: the action says discard, the state says abandoned.

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Close with a verdict — or without one

Closing archives the session as a Task. Since v2.60.0 the closure dialog also offers an optional verdict — Passed, Failed or Blocked — with nothing preselected: skipping it closes the session exactly as before. The verdict shows in the Explore hub as its own badge, is filterable there, and is written as a tag on the archived Task so Azure DevOps can query it. Two things it deliberately is not. It is final — a closed session is a record, not a draft. And it is counted nowhere: no report indicator, no quality gate. The vocabulary is borrowed from test outcomes so that testers read it without a manual; the trade-off is this note, saying plainly what it does not do. Since v2.71.0 the same dialog also offers a promotion decision — whether the delivery may move to the next environment stage (TEST → QUAL → PROD by default, configurable per project). Same contract as the verdict: optional, final, counted nowhere. Unlike the verdict, it is also written on the work item the session was run from, as a tag and one discussion comment, so the change board finds it without opening TestPulse. See Promotion decision.

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Azure DevOps storage and local export

Sessions are automatically saved in Azure DevOps Extension Data. Your capture, file-drop, bug or case creation, closure and promotion-decision actions can also write attachments and work items to Azure DevOps. They use the work-items write permission; when a release adds this permission, an administrator must approve the extension’s new permissions. If it is not approved, an explanatory banner accompanies the write refusal. PDF export is built in the browser and downloaded to your device. No TestPulse backend receives the session, but the exported file leaves Azure DevOps and you can subsequently share it. See the action matrix to distinguish saves, creations and exports.

Capture, annotate & create

Paste a screenshot, annotate it, raise a bug.

Session report

Export a signed PDF of the session.

Permissions

The work-items write scope, and when it’s used.

Privacy

Storage, visibility and exported files.