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!




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps - getting project stats for all projects

Image
If you have quite a lot of projects in your Azure DevOps organization and is looking for a way to filter the inactive projects out, that’s what   we will discuss today.   This is going to be based on the data the we see in the "Project stats" section on the landing page of an ADO project. This data gets fetched using the   "Contribution/HierarchyQuery/project" REST Api, which for some reason doesn't seem to be documented. So we may have to keep an eye out for any changes.   The apis lets you get project stats like: Work Items : created and updated Repos : Commits pushed with the number of authors, PRs created and completed the range can be specified, and accepts a maximum value of 30 days. If you use TFVC, that data is also returned - like the number of changesets and authors. I am not using it for the calculation here as we don't use TFVC.  You can also get the metrics for builds and releases - j ust in case you are interested, the
Read more

Export the members of a project level group from all the projects in an Azure DevOps

Image
How many project administrators do you have on an average per project? Though there is no real mandate or best practice on the number, I think you don’t want too many people with project admin privileges. This could also be an auditing question to figure out who can do what. Same can be the case with Build and Release admin group, other default groups or any of the custom security groups that you may have created at the project level. If you are trying to export such a list, here is a script that can help you. You can provide any project level group as the input to the script, and it will export a list containing the members of the group, across all the projects in your organization to a csv file.  The script lists both users and groups that are members of the group given as input, but do not expand groups further. You can then filter by project to look at the details of individual projects. How to run the script: The script takes three parameters: Name of th
Read more

Managing user licenses and cost for Azure DevOps.

Image
User licenses contribute to a major share of the cost for Azure DevOps services. In this post we will focus mainly on user licenses and some tips for managing them efficiently. Managing the cost associated with other paid services for Azure DevOps will be covered in a separate post. If you are part of the Azure DevOps admin team of your organization, you should be having an idea about the monthly / annual spend for Azure DevOps. The user who sets up billing for Azure DevOps services needs to have permissions at the subscription level, as explained in this article -  Add a user who can set up billing for Azure DevOps . Often what happens is, setting up billing for Azure DevOps is done by someone who has more privileges in Azure - like a subscription admin. However once the subscription is linked, an ADO collection admin can then add people and assign them licenses.  It is also possible that the ADO admin doesn't get a copy of the bill, thereby blocking the visibility to the
Read more