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June 22, 2020

Why Test Failure Analysis Is Key to Faster Delivery

Eran Kinsbruner
Eran Kinsbruner

Test reporting and analytics is the area of testing where value is realized and quality is improved. It is highly critical to the quality of your apps and the speed of your releases. Here, learn everything you need to know about test failure analysis.

In this blog we will explore everything you need to know about test failure analysis.

Read along or jump ahead to whichever section interests you most:

Table of Contents

  1. What Is Test Failure Analysis?
  2. The Importance of Test Failure Analysis
  3. Critical Features of Test Failure Analysis
  4. Perfecto Offers the Best Test Failure Analysis
  5. Get Better Test Failure Analysis
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What Is Test Failure Analysis?

Test failure analysis is the process of analyzing a failed test to see what went wrong. Teams inspect failed tests in order to find the root cause of a failure. Failure analysis in software testing allows them to fix defects and prevent them from recurring.

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The Importance of Test Failure Analysis

Testing is often the bottleneck of DevOps. Testing CAN be slow and tedious, but it doesn’t have to be. Test automation certainly helps — but you also need fast feedback. To overcome testing delays, you need visibility into how your tests perform. And that is why test failure analysis is so important.

Without a good test reporting solution, teams...

  • Lack visibility into test performance.
  • Have to sift through large amounts of results.
  • Experience significant delays.
  • Unable to distinguish between noise and real defects

Test failure analysis is a key pillar of continuous testing. It is the only way to get visibility into how your tests perform. Continuous testing creates a lot of test results data. But test automation failure analysis helps you sift through it, quickly identify defects, and fix bugs faster.

Testing teams need test failure analysis solutions in order to avoid bottlenecks. However, not all test reporting is created equally. There are some critical features you need to look for in a solution.

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Critical Features of Test Failure Analysis

Here are some important features that are helpful in test reporting solutions:

  • Root cause analysis — Get failure reasons to understand what really went wrong in your tests.
  • Actionable insights — Step-by-step drill-downs take the guesswork out of fixing defects, so you can debug apps easily.
  • False negative filtering — Cut down the noise so you can focus on real defects. False negative filtering eliminates red flags caused by things like lab issues or popups.
  • Rich test artifacts — Rich artifacts in your test reports can help you fix defects quicker. See what went wrong in the test with screenshots, videos, HAR files, crash logs, and more.
  • High level overviews — Features like heat maps are useful for executives to get a quick glance at the performance of your tests.
  • Dashboards — It’s important to have a singular view of all testing activities in one place. A dashboard that syncs all test results is an important feature for test reporting.
  • Enterprise-grade — You want a solution that can handle the large amounts of data you encounter through test automation.
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Perfecto Offers the Best Test Failure Analysis

Get the best test failure analysis with Perfecto — it’s built right into the testing platform for one unified, end-to-end testing solution.

Perfecto’s test reporting offers effective test result triaging and analysis. Grouping, classification, and noise filtering allow you to focus on the real issues, not false negatives. And as you ramp up test automation, Perfecto scales to support a large volume of test data.

Perfecto’s Test Reporting Features

Perfecto’s test failure analysis also offers the following:

  • Overview of testing throughout the CI pipeline in real time and with trends.
  • Heatmap dashboard of emerging issues in testing.
  • Cross-platform visual validation of functional/UI defects.
  • ML-powered noise reduction through detection and classification of failures.
  • Individual test reports for detailed root-cause-analysis.
  • Rich artifacts, including videos, screenshots, crash logs, vitals, and more.
  • Customizable failure reason classification and tagging.
  • Report Library list for effective triaging.
  • "Single pane of glass" provides visibility and scales to support millions of test results.
  • Run time histories for CI jobs and branches.
  • Jira integration for full traceability.

Take a look at Perfecto’s test failure analysis in action.

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Get Better Test Failure Analysis

The right solution for test failure analysis in software testing allows you to focus on actual failures that may be a risk to the business, not the false alarms. And as you mature your DevOps process and expand test automation, smart test reporting will become critical as you scale.

Try web and mobile app testing with Perfecto, and see how fast feedback and thorough test reporting can make all the difference. In the Perfecto free trial, you can:

  • Test against devices and browsers in the cloud.
  • Drill down on defects with test reporting and analytics.
  • Scale testing across platforms.
  • Integrate with anything in your toolchain.
  • And much more!

Start your free two-week trial today.

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