Execution History & Archiving

Tracking test suite health over time is essential for identifying degradation before releases. Zen Reporter automatically logs execution runs to JSONL archives and provides interactive historical views: History, File History, and Test History.

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📦 JSONL Archive Mechanism

When history archiving is enabled (enableHistory: 'auto' or true), Zen Reporter writes a lightweight .jsonl record for every test run to:

<outputDir>/runs/<run_id>.jsonl

JSONL Schema Structure

Each line in a run JSONL file records flattened execution attributes:

• run_id: Unique timestamped run identifier.
• started_at: ISO timestamp of execution start.
• suite: Test describe hierarchy string.
• file: Relative spec file path.
• title: Test case title.
• project: Playwright project profile name.
• duration_ms: Execution time in milliseconds.
• status: Result (passed, failed, timedOut, skipped, interrupted).
• attempts: Number of retry attempts executed.

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📊 History Tab Views

The History tab in the report UI offers three sub-views:

1. Historical Runs View

Lists past test execution runs in reverse chronological order:

• Run Metadata: Run name, date/time, total duration, worker counts.
• Pass/Fail Breakdown: Pass rate percentage, total tests, passed count, failed count, skipped count.
• Quality Rating Badges: Automatically assigns automated health ratings:
  • 🟢 Excellent: Pass rate ≥ 95%
  • 🟡 Needs improvement: Pass rate between 80% and 94%
  • 🔴 Critical: Pass rate < 80%
• Date-Range Filtering: Filter historical records using interactive date picker controls

2. File History View

Aggregates historical performance at the spec file level over time:

• Long-Term Spec Stability: Track historical pass rate trends for specific spec files.
• Execution Counts: Monitor how frequently spec files were executed.
• Date-Range Filtering: Filter historical records using interactive date picker controls
• Text Search: Instantly filter spec files by filename or path substring.

3. Test History View

Provides granular historical tracking for individual test cases:

• Individual Pass/Fail Rates: See how many times a specific test case passed or failed across all archived runs.
• Average Duration Analysis: Identifies tests whose execution duration is gradually increasing over time.
• Date-Range Filtering: Filter historical records using interactive date picker controls
• Text Search: Search by visible columns (Test Title, Suite, Spec File, and Project).

📈 Trends View & Charts

The Trends tab in report UI visualizes long-term quality, performance, and test composition metrics across multiple historical runs using interactive Recharts visualization:

• Pass Rate Trend Chart:

  • Pass Rate Percentage: Interactive line chart rendering historical pass rate percentages across the 15 most recent runs.
  • Interactive Run Hover Tooltips: Inspect exact pass rates for any historical run on hover.

• Duration & Worker Efficiency Trend:

  • Project Breakdown Bars: Line chart visualization detailing execution wall-clock time spent in each Playwright project profile (e.g. chromium, firefox, webkit).
  • Worker Efficiency Trend: Track execution speedup gains and parallel worker thread performance over time.

• Step Category Composition:

  • Execution Time Distribution: Visualizes breakdown of time spent in different Playwright test step categories (e.g. hook, fixture, test.step, expect assertion, pw:api).
  • Current vs. Historical Averages: Compares current run step distribution against historical benchmarks to detect assertion or setup/teardown regressions.

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💡 Managing History Archives

Rebuilding History Analytics (zr history report)

If you add or modify .jsonl files in <outputDir>/runs/, re-run the CLI aggregator command to update history.json and inject updated metrics into index.html:

npx zr history report

Disabling History

For single-run disposable CI environments, disable history archiving by setting enableHistory: false or minimalReport: true in your Playwright config.