Company Update - January 2025

In 2025 we plan to focus on polishing and improving the existing features with a focus on ease of use and developer experience. Currents is uniquely positioned as a platform that helps teams to manage the complexity of running E2E tests in CI. That includes:

• reducing CI costs with advanced orchestration, support for cloud spot instances, and rerunning only failed tests
• collecting test results for analytics, troubleshooting and monitoring
• automating testing-related workflows

We want to make sure that our platform is accessible and easy to use for teams that treat their testing stack seriously.

We are hoping to reach more companies by providing an on-premise version and publishing the platform for open-source collaboration.

📣 We are constantly looking for feedback to understand your needs and challenges better.

Currents Actions

Writing and running tests is just one step in a more comprehensive workflow. With the recent launch of the Currents Actions Engine, we are enabling teams to automate their testing-related workflows.

Currents Actions, combined with detailed reporting, integrations with third-party tools, test result histories, and observability metrics, unlocks these scenarios using a flexible set of rules and actions. It replaces ad-hoc in-house solutions with a single platform accessible to the entire team.

For example:

• Conditionally and temporarily skip or quarantine a test.
• Dynamically add a tag.
• Send an alert or open a ticket if a test becomes flaky.
• Intelligent selection of tests for CI runs: only high-impact tests run on each commit, while nightly jobs run the full test suite.

We are planning to extend the capabilities of the Actions Engine to implement more actions that support best practices of the testing workflows.

Testing Frameworks

Currents has flagship integrations for popular testing frameworks via dedicated reporters:

• Playwright
• Cypress (limited to version 12.17.4)
• Jest

We are planning to expand our support for testing frameworks. We have released a set of tools for reporting test results from various frameworks compatible with the JUnit XML reporting format. That includes Vitest, NodeJS Test Runner, Postman, WebdriverIO, Cypress 😉, and more.

CI Cost Reduction

Currents Orchestration improves Playwright’s native sharding by optimally balancing tests across multiple CI machines, which is effective for speeding up massive testing suites.

It is up to 40% faster compared to Playwright’s native sharding due to the balancing of tests across multiple CI machines, which is effective for speeding up massive testing suites.

Additionally, Currents Orchestration allows dynamically relocating tests between CI machines, which unlocks the usage of cloud Spot Instances and reduces CI expenses even more.

We will continue working on improving the orchestration efficiency, support more use cases, and make it easier to use.

Code Coverage for Playwright

Use the built-in Playwright capabilities and Currents to measure and detect changes in frontend code coverage:

• Collecting coverage reports from distributed CI machines.
• Handling test retries and interrupted runs accurately.
• Uploading raw coverage reports for processing in the background.
• Tracking coverage metrics over time, with support for filtering by tags, git metadata, and more.

Test-adjacent Reporting

Thanks to Playwright’s amazing capabilities and access to browsers’ APIs, we can collect much more data from CI test runs and present it in a meaningful way to users. For example:

• JS and CSS coverage
• UI Coverage
• Accessibility metrics
• Lighthouse reports

On-Premise, Open Source

Currents started as an enhanced version of an open-source, self-hosted project sorry-cypress. It gained support from the OSS community and allowed us to spin off the commercial version that is known as Currents.

We believe we can achieve much more together with the help of the OSS community by offering an open-core, self-hosted solution:

• Users can self-host the core product for free.
• Interested customers can install an enhanced commercial version on their premises.
• A secure and compliant cloud-based SaaS will be available for the rest.

👉🏻 Join Currents on-premise and self-hosted waitlist.

SOC 2 Certification

We underwent a rigorous examination of our security controls, policies, and procedures. We have reinforced rules and practices related to data protection, operational availability, access controls, and incident response to meet the stringent requirements of the SOC 2 framework.

With SOC 2, enterprise teams can confidently integrate Currents into their testing workflows, knowing their data is protected with industry-leading security controls.

The fastest SOC 2 Type 1 turnaround we’ve ever seen! A huge testament to your team’s diligence and security rigor.

- Catherine Hornby - AssuranceLab

Enterprise teams can now confidently use Currents with audited security controls.

Our SOC 2 Type 1 report is available at our Trust Center.

Tiny Bites

• We switched to Featurebase for managing our changelog and feature requests.

• Rerunning only failed Playwright tests in complex multi-shard setup CI is a basic but non-trivial task. We have created a set of tools that unlock rerunning only the failed Playwright tests in CI, including sharded parallel CI runs and runs created by Currents Orchestration.

• Visual regression testing with Playwright - a built-in visual regression testing tool for Playwright.

• Rerun only failed Playwright tests in CI - a set of tools that unlock rerunning only the failed Playwright tests in CI, including sharded parallel CI runs and runs created by Currents Orchestration.

• Test ownership and notifications - designate test owners and automatically send them notifications on test failures.

• Live updates with step-level streaming, because analyzing bottlenecks in performance and stability requires access to individual steps and network requests. Moreover, collecting CI test results needs to be crash-resilient.

• Up to 40% faster CI runs using Currents Orchestration, because we can improve Playwright’s native sharding by balancing tests across multiple CI machines, which is effective for speeding up massive testing suites.

• Dynamically relocating tests between CI machines, because our customers wanted to use cloud Spot Instances to reduce their CI expenses.

Publications

• 📖 From Cypress to Playwright - cost, migration steps, timeline, and AI tools

• 📖 Cypress vs Playwright for tech leaders: cost and risks analysis

• 📖 Cypress vs Playwright - Flakiness Analysis

• 📖 Currents.dev – dashboard for debugging and analyzing parallel CI test results by Playwright Enthusiast and educator Krzysiek Kijas

• 📖 In-Depth Review of Currents Playwright Dashboard by Playwright Ambassador Butch Mayhew

• 🎥 Playwright, Flakiness mitigation, Currents dashboard, and more - on Test Automation Experience YouTube Channel by Developer Advocate at Sauce Labs Nikolay Advolodkin

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Join the growing community of teams using Currents for their Cypress and Playwright tests

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