My QA Automation Journey: From Zero to CI/CD 🚀

Description and use

The author described building a CI quality gate that automatically captures and retains test failure evidence, improving visibility into pipeline failures.

Problem

Lacked a clear understanding of how to integrate QA automation tools into a professional CI/CD pipeline, leading to potential loss of test failure evidence.

Outcome

The author successfully set up a CI quality gate that captures and retains test failure evidence, improving debugging visibility in the pipeline.

Workflow

• Set up a CI pipeline using GitHub Actions
• Integrate test execution (e.g., pytest) into the pipeline
• Configure the pipeline to fail when tests fail (quality gate)
• Capture test artifacts such as screenshots, traces, videos, and HTML reports on failure
• Upload the captured artifacts to preserve failure details

Evidence

I recently set up a CI "quality gate" for a project where the process went like this:

Source

If a test fails, the pipeline should fail too—but I didn't want the evidence or data concerning that failure to be lost along with the pipeline itself.

Source