Playwright Dashboard by Currents

View, Debug and Monitor Playwright Tests

We are thrilled to announce our support for Playwright - the emerging most popular test automation framework for reliable and fast end-to-end testing for modern web apps 🚀.

After helping software teams using Cypress to run their E2E tests at scale, we are launching Playwright reporter by Currents. Playwright provides developer-friendly API, amazing performance and great releases and updates cadence.

Playwright Report by Currents

🔎 Discover how Currents can enhance your Playwright testing. Here, we will delve into how our reporting tools help to improve test performance, manage test flakiness.

Currents: Debug and analyse parallel CI test results. Cypress and Playwright Dashboard.
Currents: Debug and analyse parallel CI test results. Cypress and Playwright Dashboard.

Currents is CI-agnostic, it collects results from distributed Playwright shards, reducing troubleshooting time of failed and flaky tests with access to Playwright Traces, screenshots and videos and providing actionable insights into your test suite performance beyond an individual run.

Currents is a CI-agnostic, collects Playwright test results across multiple parallel shards
Currents is a CI-agnostic, collects Playwright test results across multiple parallel shards

👋 Book a discovery call or 👉🏻 Create an account to explore more.

E2E Tests in a Company

As a developer or QA professional 🥷 - you are well familiar with the frustration of a failed CI test - even with Playwright reporters configured, it's cumbersome to navigate the CI provider interface to find the right traces, screenshots, logs and videos. If you're using sharded parallel runs, collecting failures across different machines is quite an annoying procedure.

After fixing a failed test and restarting the CI pipeline, another set of tests is failing! The CI pipeline is red... and another restart didn't help!

Is it a flaky test or a real failure? Is the test failing on other branches? When was the last time the test failed? What is the most common error for this test?

Wouldn't it be great to go back in time and see the previous runs of this test... but only for main branch and only tagged staging...

As a team lead you want to popularize the culture of writing and fixing tests among your dev team, how could you do that? A good idea is to make it easier to show the results right where the devs are hanging out - Slack, GitHub (GitLab) PRs, or have a webhook that opens a ticket when a certain failure occurs.

Another problem you have is to reduce your test suite flakiness because your team has been reluctant to write tests - they don't trust them because they are flaky. Where should you start? It woudld be great to start measuring the flakiness, and then you'd focus one the flakiest tests first. Knowing the top errors will make it easy to resolve the flakiness more effectively.

Ideally, you want to automate this routine - something that can find the most problematic tests, e.g.: top failing tests, slowest tests, top flaky tests. Also, if suddenly a test changed its behavior - became flaky or too slow, you just want to get a report and not to dig into the test results.

Later you need to create a few reports to share with your manager - how fast are the E2E tests, are the test suite size and the coverage increasing, and what is the runs' success rate?

As an engineering manager or director 👨‍💼 you need a high-level test suite performance report for each of your projects, it also would be great to see the trends and how the performance changes with time, so you can set objectives that drive your organization's testing strategy.

Of course, your team can build a test reporting tool in-house. However, such projects usually are underestimated in their complexity, and maintaining them is always the last priority. After all, building test reporting tool is not your company's business - you can use the available resources better.

It would be great to have a service that already has it all... and also fits the budget, is reliable, scales well in terms of test volume, team size, and pricing; has SSO support, connects to your company's data lake, and has responsive, friendly and professional support.


If this situation sounds familiar, you are in the right place - 👋 Book a discovery call or 👉🏻 Create an account to explore more.

Easy Setup and Integration

It takes a few minutes to setup, and you can start collecting and reviewing your Playwright test results right away.

$ npm install --save-dev @currents/playwright
$ npx pwc --key secret --ci-build-id hello-currents

Collecting and Reviewing Playwright Executions

Currents collects test results from distributed, parallel Playwright runs with unified searchable view of the current and past executions for the whole team to review.

Currents collects execution results -  your team can browse, troubleshoot, monitor and debug the failures in a single place
Currents collects execution results - your team can browse, troubleshoot, monitor and debug the failures in a single place

Individual Playwright Run Details

Each individual runs contains details about execution environment, progress and results for more effecient troubleshooting and debugging of failed tests. The collected data includes:

  • duration and timing
  • git commit information
  • progress and results
  • the most common errors
  • detection of flaky tests
  • screenshots, videos, logs, and traces
  • metadata and custom attributes (tags, annotations, etc)

Each run contains details about execution environment, progress and results for more effecient troubleshooting and debugging of failed tests
Each run contains details about execution environment, progress and results for more effecient troubleshooting and debugging of failed tests

Identify the Top Failure Causes

Quickly identify the top failures for individual runs with a quick access to the associated tests and error details.

Quickly identify the top failures for individual runs with a quick access to the associated tests and error details

Visualize Tests Distribution

Track the progress and distribution of the tests across different shards and individual workers with a visualized makespan chart.

Track the progress and distribution of the tests across different shards and individual workers with a visualized makespan chart
Track the progress and distribution of the tests across different shards and individual workers with a visualized makespan chart

Debug Failures, Smash Flaky Tests

Quickly identify, explore and debug failures and flaky tests by accessing the artifacts collected by Currents:

  • Playwright Traces (time-travel)
  • Screenshots
  • Videos
  • CI terminal output
  • Errors Source Code and Stack Traces

The artifacts are collected for each individual test attempt, and are stored on Currents' secure and encrypted cloud storage. They are available for the whole team to review and troubleshoot the failures.

Effectively troubleshoot failures using screenshots, videos, logs and Playwright traces
Effectively troubleshoot failures using screenshots, videos, logs and Playwright traces

CI Terminal Output

Currents captures the CI terminal output so you don't need to dig into the CI logs to find the relevant information - it is available right from the test results page.

Terminal output captures the stdout and stderr from CI exections

Time-Travel with Playwright Traces

Playwright traces are a great tool for debugging failures and flaky tests. Currents collects the traces for each individual test attempt, and makes it easy to access them right from the test results page.

Playwright Traces is a powerful troubleshooting tool for failed and flaky tests

Test-Level Insights and Metrics

Knowing the context of a test failure lead to a faster resolution - having relevant information at hand makes the troubleshooting process more effective and easy.

By having access to previous execution results, Currents is able to provide test-level insights and metrics:

  • Past executions history
  • Top errors causing failures and flakiness
  • Duration, failure rate and flakiness rate

Having access to the data that is beyond just a single failure empowers your team to keep the test suite healthy and reliable.

Tests Executions History

Often it's enough to have access to a single execution result, but having an easy access to historical results of the same test, or to executions from a different branch provides a better context for troubleshooting and debugging.

Currents stores the test results history for each individual test, and makes it easy to access the previous recordings - that empowers the developers to more effectively compare the results to make sure the test is behaving as expected, and also to identify the changes that caused the test to fail.

Currents stores the test results history for each individual test, and makes it easy to access the previous recordings

Top Errors Causing Failures and Flakiness

Some error messages are more common than others - and resolving those errors first will help to reduce the whole category of failures, unblock your CI pipeline and probably identify more generic issues in your application.

Currents tracks error messages for each individual failed test attempt, and provides a quick access to the most common errors that cause failures or flakiness.

Currents tracks error messages for each individual failed test attempt, and provides a quick access to the most common errors that cause failures or flakiness
Currents tracks error messages for each individual failed test attempt, and provides a quick access to the most common errors that cause failures or flakiness

Individual Test Performance

Discover the changes and trends in your tests behavior and dont' let the test suite performance degrade.

Currents tracks the duration, failure rate and flakiness rate for every individual test, so you can measure, identify and fix the regressions in the test suite performance.

Individual test performance metrics - duration, failure rate and flakiness rate

Analytics to Drive Your Testing Strategy

In addition to having test-level information, higher-level metrics like:

  • runs success rate
  • runs duration
  • test suite size
  • test results distribution
  • test flakiness rate

allow teams to have visibility into the test suite performance, identify the trends and track organizational goals.

Currents collects the necessary data for Playwright executions and allows creating custom reports. aggregrated on daily, weekly or monthly basis. The charts can be fine-tuned and filtered by date, git branch, tags, authors, etc.

You can download the generated reports as a CSV file or get programmatic access via HTTP REST API.

Teams are using the insights to get answers to questions like:

  • Show me the flakiest tests from the last 30 days for main branch
  • Has our test suite performance improved over time?
  • What is the average run duration? Did it change recently?

Explore the available charts and reports below 👇.

Runs Status report shows the distribution of Playwright run results and runs success rate over time.

Runs Status report shows the distribution of
Playwright run results and runs success rate over
time.
Runs Status report shows the distribution of Playwright run results and runs success rate over time.

Managing Flakiness

A flaky test is a test that sometimes passes and sometimes fails. Flaky tests are annoying - they block you CI pipeline, waste CI resources, frustrate your team and undermine the trust in your test suite.

Managing flakiness becomes relevant even at early-stage companies - 3+ engineers and a dynamic product can generate enough turbulence to start producing flakiness.

Identify -> Measure -> Fix -> Monitor flakt tests with Currents
Identify -> Measure -> Fix -> Monitor flakt tests with Currents

Currents helps with keeping the flakiness under control by providing the tools to:

  • identify flaky executions
  • measure flakiness rate for individual tests
  • measure aggregated flakiness rate for the whole test suite on a project level
  • hunt down the flakiest tests and explore the flakiness reasons
  • automatically detect changes in test flakiness and alert the team

Identify Flaky Playwright Executions

Invidual flaky exections are highlighted in the resuts, in addition Currents tracks flakiness rate for each individual test.

Currents identifies flaky tests and highlights them for your team to fix
Currents identifies flaky tests and highlights them for your team to fix

Resolving Flakiness

Currents collects flakiness rate for each individual test and shows the list the tests in Tests Explorer would reveal the most flaky tests, optionally filtered by tags or git branches.

The most flaky tests are showing up at the top - you can prioritize the tests for fixing and also track the progress of your flakiness reduction efforts.

Tests Explorer allows to identify the most flaky tests and explore the flakiness reasons
Tests Explorer allows to identify the most flaky tests and explore the flakiness reasons

In addition to aggregated flakiness metrics, you also can explore the individual flaky executions of a particular test, together with the most common errors that triggered the failures.

Exploring individual executions that caused flakiness
Exploring individual executions that caused flakiness

Exploring individual executions that caused flakiness

Monitoring Test Suite Performance

Often changes in tests behavior can go unnotices for weeks - a tests starts to be flaky, or increase its duration, but the team is not aware of the changes.

Currents automatically detects the changes in test flakiness, duration and failure rate and send a weekly report with so that you can take an action.

Automated reports help to identify the changes in test suite performance
Automated reports help to identify the changes in test suite performance

Read more about Currents Automated Reports.

Integrations

Having the test results reported right where your team is hanging out is a great way to popularize the culture of writing and fixing tests.

  • Slack - get the test results right in your Slack channel
  • GitHub or GitLab - post the test results as PR comments and / or status commit checks
  • Additionally available integrations - Microsoft Teams, BitBucket and more...

Other integrations are available, and if there's no native integration for your tool, you can use the Currents Webhooks to build your own and integrate test results your existing workflows.

Integrate test results with your workflows
Integrate test results with your workflows

In addition, Currents HTTP API provides programmatically access to the test results, analytics and artifacts for your custom integrations and automation.

Debug Playwright Tests in Cloud

Our customers are telling us that Currents is a great productivity amplifier for their team - usually it replaces internal test management tools or integrates with the existing ones (Datadog, Splunk, etc).

We have been helping hundreds of companies ro run and manage their test suite at scale, processing millions of test results every month. Customers love our professional and responsive support, we are happy to listen and incorporate your feedback and feature requests.

👋 Book a discovery call or 👉🏻 Create an account to explore more.