We are excited to announce new capabilities in Azure Test Plans that will enhance your testing workflows. This feature is currently available in Public Preview. You can find instructions at the end of the article on how to request it for your Azure DevOps project.

With this latest release, we are introducing the ability to associate automated tests written in Java/JUnit (Maven and Gradle), JS (Jest) and Python (PyTest) with test cases and then run those tests with the new Azure Test Plan task. This is an addition to the ability to associate tests written in the majority of the .NET supported frameworks, which was until now only supported via Visual Studio Code.

Consequently, this should improve the overall manageability of your software testing processes and the ability to run automated tests directly from the Test Plans, either separately or in combination with manual tests. Here’s how you can take advantage of these new features.

Associate your automated test from a Build Pipeline Run

1. First, navigate to Pipelines and choose a pipeline.
2. Next, select a build.
3. In the “Tests” tab, find the automated test that you want to associate with a test case.
4. Select the test and from the command bar, click on “Associate Test Case”.
5. Finally, the side panel, find the test case to which the automated test needs to be associated and click on “Associate”.

Run your automated tests with the new Pipeline task

Imagine you have a Test Plan that contains several suites with automated tests for your e-commerce website. One of the test suites contains test cases covering the checkout page of your website. The checkout page might be considered a core part of your site as it is the last step between you and the customer’s cash. Given its importance, you might consider running this suite as part of a pipeline to ensure stable checkout functionality.

Now, you can do this with the newly introduced pipelines task: Azure Test Plan. Add this task to your pipelines and pass a Test Suite as an input variable, which contains all the test cases that have automation associated with them. You can also use a combination of automated and manual tests with this task. The pipeline won’t block until manual tests execute, allowing testers to run them at their convenience. Use the task to run unit and functional tests using the JUnit (Maven and Gradle) and Python (PyTest) frameworks.

Worth noting that, for tests written in C#, you can still leverage the existing, VSTest@3 task.

If you need to execute the tests on an ad hoc basis, outside your regular pipeline runs, you can do this from the test plans. Check out this doc that will walk you through how to run automated tests from test plans.

What’s next?

In the next few months, we will introduce another entry point for associating automated tests to test cases – from within the test case itself. Here is how that experience will look like:

1. To start, you can open any test case and navigate to the “Associated Automation” tab.
2. Then, under “Associated Automation” click on the Browse button.
3. Choose a build in which the desired test was executed and find your test, then click on Associate test.

And there’s more! During Q2 and Q3 of 2025, we will work to onboard even more popular and trending languages and frameworks, such as Python (Robot), Java (Playwright) and more.

Get started now

The feature is now available for public preview, and you can request access to it by submitting this form.