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.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.
- Abandon asks for confirmation, and a failed close is non-destructive and replayable — a session is never silently lost or left in a phantom state.
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.Everything stays in your tenant
Exploratory sessions write to Azure DevOps — attachments and work items — but only on explicit action (attach a capture, create a bug, archive the session, record a promotion decision). This is the capability that introduced the work-items write permission; adding it triggers a one-time administrator re-approval of the extension. Reads are unchanged, every write is isolated in a dedicated module, and nothing leaves your ADO tenant — no telemetry, no added dependency. If the permission isn’t approved yet, an explanatory banner replaces the raw error on any refused write.Related
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
What stays in your tenant.