Playwright test results in CI: history, failures, and trends
Playwright makes it easy to run end-to-end tests, but once those tests run continuously in CI, understanding the results becomes harder than it should be.
Teams often struggle to answer basic questions:
- Is this failure new or has it happened before?
- Which tests fail most often?
- Are test failures increasing or decreasing over time?
- Did this change actually improve test stability?
What Playwright gives you out of the box
Playwright provides test output through reporters, logs, and artifacts produced during CI runs. These are useful for debugging individual failures, especially when a test fails unexpectedly.
However, this information is scoped to a single run. Once the next CI job starts, previous results are difficult to compare or analyze without manual effort.
What breaks as test suites grow
As Playwright test suites grow in size and run frequency, teams often run into limitations:
- No clear history of test results across runs
- Flaky tests are hard to identify reliably
- Trends over time require custom scripts or spreadsheets
- Sharing results with teammates means sharing logs
At this point, test results stop being a simple pass/fail signal and start becoming data that needs to be tracked and understood.
What good Playwright test results look like
Teams that successfully manage Playwright tests in CI usually have:
- A centralized view of test results across runs
- Historical data for individual tests
- Clear visibility into flaky or unstable tests
- Simple ways to share results with the team
This allows engineers to focus on fixing problems instead of chasing logs.
How teams handle Playwright test results
Common approaches include:
- Custom scripts to store and process test output
- CI-specific summaries and artifacts
- Dedicated test results dashboards
Each approach has tradeoffs between setup effort, flexibility, and long-term maintainability.
Using Tesults with Playwright
Tesults provides a way to collect Playwright test results from CI and view them in a centralized dashboard with history and trends.
If you want to see how to upload Playwright test results the setup steps are documented here:
Playwright test results upload
If you want to see how to upload Playwright test results from CI, including GitHub Actions, the setup steps are documented here:
Playwright test results with GitHub Actions
Next step
If you want to try this with your own Playwright suite, create a Tesults account and follow the setup links above.