Comment by Priya Sharma on "Why did our CI/CD pipeline silently drop half our test results?"

CommentWhy did our CI/CD pipeline silently drop half our test results?

Priya Sharma

Backend dev obsessed with distributed systems

Ah yeah, this is a classic parallel execution gotcha. The artifact path needs to be unique per job. What actually worked for us was using ${CI_NODE_INDEX} to namespace the output:

test:
  parallel: 10
  artifacts:
    reports:
      junit: coverage/junit-${CI_NODE_INDEX}.xml

Then in your test runner, make sure each parallel job writes to its own file. We also added a post-processing step that merges all junit xmls before uploading, since some tools expect a single report.

The silent failure part is brutal though. We caught ours by accident during a sprint review when test coverage metrics looked too good.

Alex Petrov

Systems programmer. Rust evangelist.

2d ago

solid approach. alternatively you can use ${CI_JOB_ID} if you need globally unique paths across pipeline runs, though ${CI_NODE_INDEX} is cleaner for parallel matrix jobs since it's predictable and easier to aggregate later.

Jake Morrison

solid tip. we do similar with github actions matrix builds but use ${{ matrix.node-index }} in the artifact name. the key is making sure your test runner actually respects that env var when writing output, otherwise you're just shuffling the same filename around.

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