A PDF with attribution and timestamp
A finished session exports to a PDF with attribution and timestamp: the charter, its duration and campaign tag, the full chronological timeline, the work items you created, and a tester signature with a timestamp in the footer of every page — in French or English, following the active language. Screenshots are embedded as images; if a capture can’t be fetched (network, on-premises), it is simply listed by name — the report never breaks. Non-image files are always listed by name. Since v2.71.0 the cover grid also shows the environment stage when one was chosen, and a coloured band carries the promotion decision — transition, value, comment, and an audit line naming who recorded it, when, and what happened on the host work item. Without a decision, the cover is unchanged.The displayed signature is textual attribution with a timestamp. It is not a certificate-based digital signature.
Find a closed session from its Task
- From Previous sessions on the original work item or the Explore hub, open the session’s tracking Task.
- Open that Task’s Explore tab. You should see Session ended, its charter and the creation and export actions. Read the full chronology in the Task’s report or the PDF.
- Export the PDF report. You can also create a bug or test case from session entries: this creates a new work item without reopening the timeline.
- Check the charter, evidence and attribution in the downloaded document.
Evidence produced during the session
Both the report written into the tracking Task and the exported PDF carry an Evidence section listing every attachment of the session — files you dropped and captures you pasted alike — with its name, time and size, in chronological order. A session without attachments shows no section at all. The two surfaces do different jobs. The report in the Task is a register: written once at closing and never revisited, it lists what was produced and carries no link — real access is one tab away on the same work item, and that tab always reflects reality. The PDF is the access surface, the only one that travels outside Azure DevOps, so that is where the links live. When the PDF is generated, one grouped call reads which attachments are still linked to the Task. One that is no longer there reads Attachment unavailable instead of offering a link that leads nowhere. If that call fails, or the session was never materialised, nothing is concluded and every link renders as usual — a network incident must never look like evidence being deleted.An image you dropped stays an attachment line rather than becoming a thumbnail. Only pasted captures are embedded in the PDF, and that distinction is deliberate.
All closed sessions of a story
A second button, always available in the tab, exports every closed session of the user story as a single PDF, grouped by host work item. It reads the same archived data as session restore, with no extra Azure DevOps call — handy for a campaign wrap-up or an audit trail.Reliable close
Since 2.73.1, closure waits for an in-flight save to finish before saving the closed session. An index write conflict is retried once and the host form is refreshed only after the full save. If an error appears, read the message and check objects already created before retrying: a partial write does not mean nothing was saved.Your branding, your title
Exploratory reports follow the branding you configured in Settings — header and footer label, theme colour, cover page logo — so they look like the rest of your reports rather than like the tool. Exports launched from the Sessions hub open a dialog with a pre-filled title: accept it as-is, or rewrite it. Cancelling the dialog cancels the export, with no partial file.Related
Explore overview
Start a session and take notes.
Capture, annotate & create
Annotate captures and raise work items.
Sessions hub
Find every session of the project.