Why visual of instant failure notification can be critical? With the overwhelming increase in the adoption of the automation in any software development cycle and more so because it has become such an integral part of agile testing that it is difficult to think of one without the other.
More often over a period of time as we start working towards increasing the automation coverage, we generally end up having a test suite which consists of large number of test cases.
This essentially throws a challenge, as mostly the automation execution reports are configured as a post build step in the Automation Framework, which means we get to know about the failure test cases only after the execution of the test suite gets completed
So in a situation during the execution of test suite consist of a large number of test cases, if a failure is encountered at the very beginning of certain test case; we still need to wait till the end to get the final test suite report before an alert is raised.
And in any automation framework, the Feedback should be fast and serviceable and delivered in a way that lets teams respond rapidly. The major drawback in the traditional approach in integrating the email or any push notification solution is, by the time we get the failure report; it may be too late before the broken functionality is fixed which sometimes can be a very adverse, if it was a critical bug. And which otherwise could had been resolved earlier. In addition to this, in most of the frameworks, the HTML report generated is hosted on the company's private network and it would first require connecting to the VPN if the test reports are being accessed outside of the office network, so as to open the report and check the related screenshots to see which test case has failed and why it got failed.
So, why not raise an alert as soon as the test case fails? And why not attach a screenshot along with that alert so that all the stake holders can actually see what has failed in the application so that everyone can react to it immediately and the damage will be minimized?
To overcome all of such challenges building a solution of sending an alert along with the failed test case screenshot with a snippet of trace log by integrating slack with selenium, will help to alert all the stake holders as soon as an automated test case fails.
Slack notification with screenshot and trace log attached when a TC fails