Currents Update - May 2024
May 2024: latest updates from Currents - looking back at the last few months and sharing our plans for the future.
The last few months were quite exciting for Currents. After Cypress blocking, we had to reevaluate how to best serve our customers and what to do next. We were focused on:
- improving (rewriting) our integration with Playwright and helping teams to transition from Cypress to Playwright
- building a safe and block-free solution for existing Cypress customers
- expanding support to other testing frameworks (jest for now, more to come)
- scaling up the team and planning our next steps
Cypress vs Playwright
Playwright
Today, Playwright is the most downloaded E2E testing framework.
During the last few months, we helped dozens of our customers to migrate from Cypress to Playwright. Teams were overwhelmingly happy with switching to Playwright.
The most frequent feedback we hear in favour of Playwright is:
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better performance → faster CI runs, lower CI bills
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better devex → “it’s just javascript”, VSCode integration, Playwright Traces
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reduced flakiness → less bugs, stable pipelines, happy teams
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lock-in risk → the juiciest Cypress features are locked for enterprise customers, which isn't the case for Playwright
We invested a lot into improving our integration with Playwright, including rewriting our backend systems. That allowed us to release new exciting features that are saving our customers time and money.
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🏎️ Fully parallel mode support, because every test reporting tool needs to support it.
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✨ 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.
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⚡️ 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.
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🚥 Dynamically relocating tests between CI machines, because our customers wanted to use cloud Spot Instances to reduce their CI expenses.
Cypress
We continue supporting Cypress version 12.17.4 and below. Today we are hosting and distributing block-free versions of Cypress that we forked and built from the MIT-licensed source code. It is safe to use without the risk of being blocked.
Many asked about supporting the newer versions of Cypress (13+), including Test Replay. We’ve built an alternative test runner from a forked MIT-licensed source. The feedback we’ve got revealed concerns about the complexity of support, managing roadmap and adoption. When asked, teams preferred to invest the time switching to Playwright as a well-maintained and widely-adopted solution, rather than having an “escape hatch” in a form of forked Cypress.
Considering the mentioned above, we deferred the option of publishing the alternative runner in favour of other activities.
What's next for Currents?
We are happy to share the areas we will be focusing on in the near future. We are curious to get your feedback and ideas on the topics listed below.
P.S. Don't treat it as a hard commitment - plans tend to change 😉
More Testing Frameworks
One of the most frequent questions we hear is “how do I send test results from [your choice] to Currents?”.
Indeed, we are expanding our support to additional testing frameworks. We started with jest . Please tell us what frameworks should we support next: vitest, NodeJS test runner, bun or something else?
Better Insights
We collect quite a lot of data about your tests; however, we need to improve our interpretation of this data. For example:
- cross-branch and cross-run insights about errors and performance
- better visualizations of test history
- detecting and highlighting trends and anomalies
- using AI tools to facilitate troubleshooting and getting insights
Workflows
Testing doesn’t start and end at reporting. We want Currents to support your team’s workflows, simplify and automate the tasks related to managing tests, triaging errors, tracking performance etc. For example:
- integrations with 3rd parties, like Jira, Linear and more
- robust notification based on test ownership or rules
- quarantining or “muting” tests
- triaging failures and test-related issues
On-Premise, Open Source, Compliance
Currents started as an enhanced version of an open-source, self-hosted project sorry-cypress. It gained support from OSS community and allowed 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.
Misc
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We've expanded our engineering team and welcomed DJ (David) Mourney and Walter Galvao - both are experienced software development professionals, passionate about building developer tools and open source software.
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Some of our customers agreed to share their journey - including migration from Cypress to Playwright, adopting Currents and improving the health and effectiveness of their testing suite.
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We switched to Featurebase for managing our changelog and feature requests.
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Currents was featured in various online publications:
- 📖 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 Advolokin
Join the growing community of team using Currents for their Cypress and Playwright tests
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