Distribute Test list using Azure Devops

Hi David,

This is an interesting topic to discuss. The distributed execution of a test list is managed by the Test Studio Scheduling service and can be considered as part of its design.

The CI tool, in which you can implement the test execution, certainly does not have such logic to handle split of the test list and then combining it back when it comes to the results. The integration of the Test Studio tests in any CI tool is actually defining the CMD task to trigger the test runs and setting up the CI agent to run in interactive mode. The rest of the configuration - how many machines will be used, what role will these play, etc., is part of the configuration for the specific CI environment. 

That said, you will not be able to accomplish the distribution as it is in terms of Test Studio Scheduling, but you should be able to use more than one machine to execute the tests on. I am not proficient in Azure DevOps in depth and I don't have exact step-by-step solution for such setup. However, based on the Azure Devops pipelines key concept I assume that using different machines for the different tasks in a pipeline, is a working scenario. The self-hosted agents, which you need to configure for the Test Studio runs, are the Azure agents and can be installed on multiple machines. Then, when building the tasks, you choose which is the agent from the selected Agent pool on which to run the task on. 

After a glance look over the Microsoft documentation about Azure DevOps pipelines, a setup with multiple machines seems completely possible. Still, I am no expert in configuring Azure CI and the pointed articles may not fully cover what you need. While I was searching for further information, I noticed that there are plenty of videos on the web for configuring a pipeline, so this is one more option you can explore (I didn't want to refer any of these directly, as I am not sure which of them was most relevant).  

I hope that this information will help you choose the best way to configure the Azure pipeline for your needs. Do not hesitate to continue the discussion if necessary. 

Thank you for your understanding in advance.

Regards,
Elena
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