March 2023 Launchable Product Updates

Hey everyone! We're excited to share the latest updates to Launchable, the Test Intelligence Platform that helps you ship faster with more confidence. Over the past month, our team has been hard at work building new features and enhancements to help developers and DevOps teams test what matters and find bugs faster.

With the latest feature rollouts, Launchable continues to help you optimize your CI pipeline efficiency, reduce risk, increase commit frequency, and decrease time-to-production. From easier link builds between Launchable and your existing tools, to navigating directly to your list of tests selected for a test session by Predictive Test Selection, this month’s releases are all about launching fearlessly.

Link builds and test sessions to your existing tools

Launchable's object model — specifically "builds" and "test sessions" — map to concepts in your existing tools.

For example, both builds and test sessions map back to stages/steps/pipelines in your CI system. There might be one link that covers everything, or if your testing process is split across multiple servers, maybe there are multiple links. Similarly, a build or test session might be logically associated with a GitHub pull request or a Jira ticket.

This context is important when you're looking at build and test session details in Launchable. To make it easier to navigate between your existing tools and Launchable, you can now add links to build records and test session records using the --link option in the CLI. To make populating this variable easier, most CI systems surface environment variables you can combine to compose a link value.

Any links you add will show up in the Launchable web app on the Build details page and the Test Session details page respectively:

(Hint: you can add multiple links to each!)

Note that Launchable automatically creates links to GitHub Actions runs, Jenkins jobs, CircleCI runs, and GitHub pull requests, so you don't need to add those.

To get started, just update your CI scripts to use the --link option wherever you invoke Launchable. Check out the docs for more info (search for "link").

Give names to your test sessions

Sometimes you want to correlate the data you see in Launchable with the CI process that it came from. Usually, this involves navigating your CI system, which takes time.

Build and test session links are one solution to this (above). However, if you run multiple test sessions against a single build and they are all associated with the same URL in your CI system, it's hard to tell each session apart.

To solve this problem, you can now give each test session a unique name for easier disambiguation.

To name a test session, pass the --session-name option to whichever command you use that creates a test session. This is either:

• launchable record session

• launchable subset

• launchable record tests

(We suggest using built-in CI environment variables to set this value.)

Then, that name will show up in the Launchable web app in place of its ID:

Quickly view selected tests

You can now navigate directly to the list of tests that Predictive Test Selection selected for a test session. In any test session list view, open the Predictive Test Selection summary and click on the test counts:

New UI for creating notification subscriptions in Slack

The Launchable Test Notifications Slack app sends you notifications about the test sessions you care about. You can create a subscription for all test sessions run against in GitHub Actions that you triggered. Or you could create a subscription for a specific branch.

Previously, the only way to create a subscription was to use the /launchable subscribe command.

Now you can also subscribe to test sessions using the "Create New Subscription" button on the new Home tab in the Launchable Test Notifications Slack app. This button opens a modal form that you can simply fill in instead of having to construct a complex text command: