Test plan cannot be saved. The structure path XXX is not valid

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Lately one of our customer reported this problem that on hosted tfs service, he is not able to create a test plan and creation/update of test plan fails with the error “Test plan cannot be saved. The structure path XXX is not valid”.

Here is how we solved this problem. Nipun & me investigated this issue and made following observations: -

  1. The problem was observed only for few iteration paths (XXX) and not all. So customer was able to create a test plan in sprint1 for example and was not able to create it under sprint3.
  2. Also it was being observed for test plan creation/update and was not being observed for creation of test cases in that iteration path.
  3. The problem was being observed from MTM only and user was able to create various types of work items in the failing iteration path from visual studio.

We came to know that customer has renamed the failing iteration paths few times. We also knew that the test management service maintains a cache of the areas/iteration paths and on debugging we found that the cache did not have the failing iteration paths which is the reason for the above failure.

We could not find out why cache did not have those iteration paths but as a workaround, we renamed the failing iteration paths again which in-turn trigged the cache update and after that user was able to create/update test plan in the failing iteration paths.

Happy debugging !!