Make Your Test Automation Notifications Useful To The Entire Team

“Test automation, that’s the job of QA right?”

While implementing good automated tests do require expertise, delivering high-quality software requires the entire team collaboration. Transversal interactions are improved when the team members work on the same information channels.

The usage of a communication platform with embedded chat and group calls is now a standard. But how many times the channels are restricted to existing teams? The cross-functional team – product owners, developers, QA, etc – needs regular sharing.

Test automation notifications can make the difference to increase the software quality. When a software engineer receives a failing test alert within a CI/CD pipeline, he can implement a fix quicker. That’s the power of faster feedback loops.

Your test automation solution therefore requires flexible notifications capabilities. 

Cerberus Testing is the 100% open source test automation platform now providing increased features of notifications with built-in hooks for future connectors. This article shares the various use-cases supported within Cerberus Testing.

Follow Cerberus Testing for more open source test automation.

Get notified depending on your test campaign reports

A test automation campaign enables you to run a whole set of verifications in a particular context. You can implement quality gates using a non-regression campaign in CI/CD, or customer journey monitoring with tests running regularly in production.

In Cerberus Testing, you can configure hooks for the various campaign events such as start, end, and even on specific CI scores. These options are now available in the new menu “Developer > Event Hooks”.

Test campaign notifications will inform your engineering team about tests run in a specific environment. When a bug is found, they can react quickly and comment on the notifications to let the team know they are working on it.

You can even do that on a finer grain.

Get notified on your individual test execution results

The execution of individual automated tests is useful when you want more fine-grained notifications. You can want restricted notifications while fine-tuning a specific test, or notify specific stakeholders for a specific use-case.

Configuring notifications for specific tests follows the same logic as the campaign ones in Cerberus Testing. Using the same menu, you need to select the “EXECUTION_*” events and set your parameters to the selected test cases.

Two optional parameters are available to specify the scope of test cases. “Object1” will filter on an entire Test Folder. You can go further using “Object2 “ to filter by Test Case ID. We highly recommend setting one of these parameters to avoid flooding your team.

Outside of the execution, you also need to react when test changes.

Get notified when an automated test is evolving

Your test cases reflect the requirements of your software. As you evolve the product to improve your value proposition, your software requirements and associated test cases are therefore also evolving in cascade. Reacting fast will avoid false positives.

Test cases changes happen in three main cases: create, update and delete. Each of these events can require a different reaction on your side. For example, a new or updated test case needs to be reviewed and potentially added to a campaign.

You can use the same configuration logic for campaign, execution and test cases. Select your event reference and narrow down the scope of notifications using the “Object1” and “Object2” parameters.

For any of these notifications to be useful, you need to receive them.

Get notified on your preferred communication channels

Your team members are already overwhelmed with the information flow. Test automation notifications have to be embedded in their preferred communication channels to be seen and used on a regular basis. That’s the power of having native connectors. 

Cerberus Testing enables you to receive notifications for different providers using a minimal configuration. You can be notified by email, slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat. A generic connector is also available for future connector implementation.

The communication platform usually only requires knowing the webhook url and the channel. You just need to configure these respective parameters into the “Recipient” and “Channel” fields of the event hooks area.

You are now ready to deliver useful notifications.

Make test automation notifications useful to your team

Productive engineering teams rely on fast feedback loops of software changes. You can make a difference in your organization by building useful test automation notifications. The true value of your automated tests lies in the collaboration improvements.

By using Cerberus Testing, you can natively access the entire set of notifications use-cases we shared. Use the Free Cloud Plan to accelerate your test automation, and feel free to share on GitHub if you have a specific requirement.

This event hook capability is helpful for notifications but not only. We can now react to more test automation events and connect to more platforms. For example, we will be able to send automated tests to JIRA/Xray or external test reporting.

Follow Cerberus Testing for more open source test automation.