Microsoft.Testing.Platform improves test reporting for CI/CD pipelines

Enhanced Test Reporting in MTP

Microsoft.Testing.Platform (MTP), which powers 'dotnet test' and test explorers in Visual Studio and VS Code, has introduced new reporting capabilities. These enhancements are designed to provide more immediate and actionable feedback on test failures within continuous integration (CI) environments. The goal is to reduce the time developers spend identifying the root cause of a failed build.

Inline Failure Annotations

A key feature is the ability to surface test failures directly within the platform where developers are already working. For GitHub Actions, enabling '--report-gh' displays failing tests as annotations on the relevant line of code. Skipped tests appear as warnings, and a summary is written to the workflow page. This eliminates the need to download separate report artifacts.

Similarly, Azure DevOps users can utilize '--report-azdo' for inline reporting. Additionally, '--publish-azdo-test-results' streams results into the Tests tab while the run is still in progress, rather than waiting for a separate publish step.

History-Based Triage for Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps offers an exclusive feature for history-based triage. This allows reviewers to differentiate between new regressions and recurring test failures, providing valuable context for debugging. This functionality helps teams prioritize and address issues more effectively by understanding their historical patterns.

Availability and Compatibility

Most of these reporting capabilities require MTP 2.3.0 or later. The examples provided were validated with MSTest.Sdk 4.3.3 and MTP 2.3.3. The GitHub Actions, JUnit, and CTRF reporters are currently available as preview packages. MTP supports various test frameworks including MSTest, NUnit, xUnit.net, TUnit, and Expecto.