lecture 13 of 150 completed

Reports, screenshots and video

When a test fails at 3am on a build server, the report is all you get. Make it enough to diagnose without re-running.

What you'll learn

  • What evidence a failed CI run leaves behind
  • How to make a report readable by someone who was not watching
  • Why artifacts must be uploaded, not just written

A failure on your machine is easy. You watch it happen, you open the runner, you scrub back through the command log.

A failure on the build server is a line of text in a log nobody read, at three in the morning, on a machine that no longer exists. What you collect automatically is all you will ever have.

Cypress collects three kinds of evidence, and two of them are on by default.

Screenshots on failure. When a test fails during cypress run, Cypress saves a screenshot of the moment it failed, into cypress/screenshots. This single image answers most questions: was the page blank, was there an error banner, was a dialog covering the button.

full course

Keep reading with the full course

The Foundations track and the first lessons in each framework are free. This lesson needs full course access. A course plan includes all lessons for Playwright, Cypress and Selenium.

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