Do you really need so many Basic + Test Plans licenses?

Planning to discuss another cost saving opportunity in Azure DevOps in this post.

 

You can find the number of Basic + Test Plans licenses you are currently consuming by looking at the summary from the users page under org settings in Azure DevOps, or by hitting the User Entitlement Summary API. Multiply the number by $52 to get your monthly spend for this license type.

 

The below article has a comparison of the activities that can be performed with Basic vs Basic + Test Plans licenses:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/test/manual-test-permissions?view=azure-devops#license-requirements

 

This is a short summary of the comparison:

Basic + Test Plans 

Basic 
    1. Create test cases from the Define tab inside Azure Test Plans. 

     
    1. Create test cases (but not from Define tab in Azure Test Plans. 
    1. Add test cases to suites and assign Testers. 
    1. Execute tests. 
    1. Create Test Plans and Suites 
    1. Use charts. 

 

 

From a pricing standpoint:

Basic : First 5 users free, then $6 per user per month

Basic + Test Plans : $52 per user per month

 

But what if the users assigned with Basic + Test Plan licenses are not really using the extra features that comes with it? They might actually just need Basic license, and that could bring in some savings. Unless you have been very cautious about processing the Basic + Test Plan license requests right from the start to make sure it just goes to the right people, chances are that you might find quite a few users who may not really need it.

 

It is pretty easy to automate license management for Basic licenses - we can check the last accessed date and then figure out that a user has not logged in for quite some time, and then decide to downgrade the license. Unfortunately, there is no straight forward way to figure out if Basic + Test Plans license holders are actually using these features. The only way would be to go through the list and analyze / ask people if they really need it.

 

If you have many team projects, probably one more approach you could take is to figure out how many people in a project have this license type, and see if this can be cut down by improving the collaboration between the team members. Everyone may not really have to create a Test Plan or  Suite very frequently. There are also ways in which the basic users can create test cases, and then the Test Plan license holder can query and add them to plans and suites. We will probably discuss about these options in a different post.

 

Below is a script that can generate a report indicating the project wise user license assignment. Basically the report would list all the users in a project and the license type they hold, for all the projects in your organization. If there are AAD groups, that those are also listed. But you may have to check the AAD group members separately as they are not expanded. (That can also be expanded using REST APIs if needed.) The csv generated will have the below columns:

  1. Project Name
  2. User Name
  3. User Email
  4. License Type
  5. IsAADGroup

 

Once you generate the report, filter it by license type and see if there is a scope to cut-down the Test Plan licenses. You may have users spanning multiple projects as well. The approach will be different for different organizations, but I hope this post and the data generated by the report helps you!




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