How to delete a Test Case / any other Work Item?

I saw some Qs on forums asking about how to delete a test case from MTLM (Microsoft Test and Lab Manager). Please note that you can’t delete a test case from MTLM. But as test case is eventually a work item so you can achieve the same using witadmin provided you’ve admin permissions. witadmin is a command-line utility and is located in %Program Files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE. Please note that this is an admin operation and we don’t encourage using it a lot in general. The usual guideline is to close the obsolete / not required test cases and move it out of your test suite.

Anyhow, here is the way to delete the test case or any other work item using witadmin:

witadmin destroywi /collection:CollectionURL /id:id [/noprompt]

The following example deletes the work items with IDs, 12, 15, and 23 from the database for Collection1 on the AdventureWorksServer server:

witadmin destroywi /collection:https://AdventureWorksServer:8080/AWTeam/Collection1 /id:12,15,23

You can read in detail about permanently removing work items using witadmin here.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 14, 2009
  Very helpful! BTW, how can I get the MTLM Test Runner to open a renamed WI definition? See http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/tfsprerelease/thread/690e1817-5744-43d9-b952-95531276cc47 Thanks!

• Anonymous
  December 14, 2009
  Bob, I wrote this post(http://blogs.msdn.com/rubel/archive/2009/12/15/how-can-i-configure-mtlm-to-use-my-custom-bug-test-case-type.aspx) for this specific query. I hope it will answer your question. Let me know if you need more info. Thanks Rubel