IMHO the most exciting feature of Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 3, among all its goodness, is the migration of Test Suites and Test Plans to plain Work Item Types – and the reason is pretty simple.
Despite all the effort spent, developers and testers still had a tiny line which kept splitting them and their worlds:
Which eventually led to limited shared information (pinned items on the Web Access) between them. Which was a cause of pain and frustration, especially among the testers. Using Tags was a way of sorting it, but to be fair not properly the best…
But right now all the testing artefacts are Work Item Types – Test Plans, Suites and Cases – so you can query them and, mostly important, you can easily add custom fields, rules and workflows like with the existing WITs.
For example, I might have Test Suites with a specific Feature Area (potentially reused across other Work Item Types) as well as a Planned Release field. I can easily add them to the Test Suite Work Item Type:
The cool stuff is that all of these are now queryable!
…and obviously, pinnable to the team’s home page:
That’s why it is way easier for testers now to access and share relevant information.