So in my team a special the question has come up, how to make sure that the testers in my team can run a test plan and easily choose the version against which they test?
Normally - according to what it appears like - you would first run a build pipeline, take the created binaries, run your tests against them and then (if the test results are OK) send the binaries to a release pipeline. That's what the test plan settings menu suggests and that's also what Microsoft suggests:
However, what I'm trying to do is a little different. In my case we have two major components that run on two different target servers, both of those majro components are sub-divided into many sub-components. All of the sub-components have their own build pipelines and are built individually.
I'd actually like to use a release pipeline to bundle all of the components into two server disk images (two release pipeline or two stages, doesn't matter that much). In this release pipeline I would like to give the entire product a common global version number. I'd like to choose this common product version number in a dropdown when running a test plan. Version numbers are dynamically included into build numbers / release numbers.
But his seems impossible. It looks like the prerequisite can only be a build pipeline and release pipelines are only there as a post test step (of course this makes sense in a standard scenario).
My question is, can I in any way get to choose instead of a build pipeline's build number a release pipeline's release number as a basis for a test plan run? I don't care how, even if it means creating cutoms templates of some sort.
Any suggestion greatly appreciated!
