Managing TFS 2010: How to clean up test attachment data

Buck Hodges

March 18th, 20110 0

Test attachment data generated by the new testing features in VS 2010 can add a large amount of data to your TFS server. In fact, we discovered on our own “dogfood” server that test data was taking up more space than the version control data. You can read more about it in Grant’s post here.

You can use the Test Attachment Cleaner for Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 & Test Professional 2010 to delete old test data to reduce the size. Here’s the description from that page.

Overview:

In Visual Studio 2010, with the introduction of Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 & Visual Studio Premium/Ultimate 2010 SKUs, testers can author manual and automated Test cases, configure the different diagnostic data collectors (as part of Test Settings), associate the Test Settings with Test Plan/Suites and then execute these test cases as part of Test Runs. The execution of a Test Run (whether automated or manual) generates a bunch of diagnostic data, which may be captured either automatically by the system or manually by the tester. This diagnostic data is critical in eliminating the “no repro” bug scenarios between the testers and developers.

However, the downside of this rich diagnostic data captures is that the system/user generated diagnostic data, over a period of time, can grow at a rapid pace and start taking up database space. With Visual Studio 2010, the database administrator has little or no control over what data gets attached as part of Test Runs – i.e., there are no policy settings he can control to limit the size of the data capture OR no retention policy to determine how long to hold this data before initiating a cleanup. In such scenarios, the Admin has no mechanism to:

1. Determine which set of diagnostic captures is taking up how much space AND

2. Reclaim the space for runs which are no longer relevant from business perspective.

The “Test Attachment Cleaner” powertool fills this void by serving both the above points.