Test Status
Playwright and Cypress Test Status - detailed guide and explanation
Playwright and Cypress test status is mostly straightforward to interpret, however, there are a few confusing concepts that can be tricky to figure out.
Playwright Test Status
Playwright test's status is a composition of:
the status of its attempts
its expected status
The final status is determined after a test has finished all its retries, test.afterEach() hook and fixtures and depends on the expected status and the status of all the retries.
See Playwright Test Status - Summary Table for reference of how Playwright statuses appear in Currents.
Playwright Test Retry Status
Each test retry can be in one of the following statuses:
passed - means that the test retry didn't encounter any error or exception while executing the test body or the associated
test.beforeEach
ortest.afterEach
hooksfailed - means that the test retry failed due to an assertion error, exception in the test's body or the associated
test.beforeEach
ortest.afterEach
hooks. An exception or failure oftest.beforeAll
hooks will cause afailed
status in the first test attempt according to the execution order.interrupted - means that the execution of a test retry was halted before it could be completed. This interruption could occur due to a variety of reasons, such as:
Uncaught Exception.
Unhandled Rejection.
Interrupted by a system signal like SIGINT (CTRL / CMD + C).
maxFailures limit reached (the rest of the tests get stats interrupted).
timedOut - indicates that the test retry did not finish within a specified time limit, leading to its automatic termination. Each test's timeout depends on testConfig.timeout, testProject.timeout, test.setTimeout(), test.slow() and testInfo.setTimeout().
skipped - indicates that the test retry was not executed. This can happen for several reasons:
If you programmatically skip tests based on certain conditions.
If you explicitly skip a test with test.skip() or test.fixme().
If you're using a feature like
.only
to focus on specific test.If a previous test in a test group failed or timed out (see below).
Playwright Expected Status
Playwright tests have expected status, you can set the expected status as follows:
Tests marked as test.skip() or test.fixme() are expected to be
skipped
.Tests marked as test. fail() are expected to be
failed
.Other tests are expected to be
passed
.
Playwright Test Outcome
Combining the expected status with test retries status defines Playwright test outcome:
skipped
- means all the attempts were skipped (because the test was marked as test.skip() or test.fixme())expected
- means all the attempts' status matches theexpectedStatus
a test has
expectedStatus=failed
all attempts werefailed
(but nottimedOut
)a test has
expectedStatus=passed
and all attempts have a statuspassed
unexpected
- all attempts' status does not match theexpectedStatus
flaky
- some attempts' status matches the expected status, and some do not. See below.
Playwright Flaky Tests
Playwright marks a test as flaky if some attempts match the expected status and some don't. For example:
there are multiple test attempts and
there is at least one
passed
attempt andthere's at least one
failed
ortimedOut
attempt
It can be tricky to interpret the result depending on the expected status. For example, all the tests below will be considered flaky:
See Flaky Testsfor more details about learning how to use Currents Dashboard when dealing with flaky tests.
Serial Mode and Playwright Test Status
It is recommended to avoid dependencies between tests and ensure that every test is isolated for more efficient retries and parallelization
Enabling Serial Mode for Playwright Tests changes the default behaviour: a group of tests designated to run serially always run together, one after another. A failure or a timeout in a test causes all the subsequent tests in the group to become skipped
. Depending on the number of retries left, all the tests will run again until completion.
Use test.describe.serial() to group dependent tests to ensure they will always run together and in order. If one of the tests fails, all subsequent tests are skipped. All tests in the group are retried together.
Determining test status for serial tests follows the same principles as for other tests, however, you should be aware of that behaviour and interpret the results accordingly.
Console Output of the Playwrigth Reporter
The Playwright Console Output has a precise and accurate presentation of the execution workflow.
Each attempt has its start and end timestamps, status details, detected errors, stdout and stderr output.
Clear separation between tests flakiness and outcome status - determining a test's "status" and flakiness requires considering the outcome of all the attempts, the expected status and the execution mode (e.g. "serial" mode can generate extra attempts).
![](https://docs.currents.dev/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F3745692499-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252FqmFDEiUa9mr11LUlxDnt%252Fuploads%252FvrKr8vRwXyPCnnOSkBGL%252FScreenshot%25202024-06-17%2520at%252001.10.46.png%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D7112c781-209a-4e73-8c45-923fba384ba8&width=768&dpr=4&quality=100&sign=88fe926c&sv=1)
Moreover, inline links to individual test results is part of console output:
![](https://docs.currents.dev/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F3745692499-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252FqmFDEiUa9mr11LUlxDnt%252Fuploads%252FlZTXllig1tmUyZKTa5Ee%252FScreenshot%25202024-06-17%2520at%252001.10.57.png%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D2d3f6fbf-d185-4489-9ef8-1d9cdcd5a17f&width=768&dpr=4&quality=100&sign=c39799b3&sv=1)
Playwright Test Status - Summary Table
Refer to the table below to determine how a certain combination of expectedStatus
and outcome
affects the status reported to Currents Dashboard.
PW Expected Status | PW Actual Status | PW Outcome | Currents Status |
---|---|---|---|
failed | passed | unexpected | failed |
failed | timedOut | unexpected | failed |
failed | failed | expected | passed |
passed | passed | expected | passed |
passed | timedOut | unexpected | failed |
passed | failed | unexpected | failed |
skipped | skipped | expected | ignored |
Cypress Tests Status
Cypress test can be in one of the following states:
Passed - a test completed all attempts without any exceptions or errors during its execution, including all
before
andbeforeEach
expressions. During its execution, the test runner didn't encounter any timeouts, exceptions or failed assertions. Please note, for tests with multiple attempts, if the last attempt was successful, the whole test will be marked as "Passed" but "Flaky". See Flaky Tests for details.Failed - a test that triggered an exception or one of its assertions failed during the execution of
before
,beforeEach
or the test body for each of its attempts. A failed test activates capturing a stack trace, a screenshot and a video recording. All of those will be shown in Currents dashboard and are available for exploration of failed test details. In some cases, cypress runner isn't able to capture a screenshot and useful error information - for example, when the spec file associated with the test cannot be parsed, or there's a crash in the runtime environment.Ignored / Pending - a test was excluded by a developer, e.g.
it.skip()
and was excluded by a runner.Ignored/pending
tests are tests that were:explicitly marked by a developer to be excluded, e.g.
it.skip(),
describe.skip()
orxit()
a test that is not implemented - i.e. a test that has no "body". For example,
it('nothing is here')
a test suite that was filtered out in test/suite configuration, for example:
describe('Skip in Chrome', { browser: '!chrome' }, () => {/* ... */})
Skipped - a test that was supposed to run but has been skipped because of a runtime error. This state is exclusive to Cypress executions. One of the most common examples is a situation where there's a crash in
beforeEach.
After unsuccessfully running the first test and recognizing an error inbeforeEach,
Cypress runner "skips" the rest of the tests because they would fail due to the same error. Currents marks spec files and runs with skipped tests as "failed".
In addition to the statuses above, a test can be marked as Flaky if the test passes after a few failing attempts. See Flaky Tests.
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