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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.
  • 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.

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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). 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.

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.