Comparing changes between test and flow versions

Tests and flows both keep track of their version whenever changes are saved. To understand what these changes are many tools, including mabl, offer a helpful line-by-line diffing view to allow you to understand changes between these versions.

Use cases

Collaboration

When working with multiple teammates, especially those that are new to the mabl platform, the ability to diff changes can be critical to understanding how your teammates are contributing to your testing. Additionally, it can be helpful to determine whether those contributions are following your team's process and best practices.

Failure diagnosis

Tests can fail when unexpected changes are added, such as steps that were added in the wrong place in the test or variables that may not have been added. Thanks to this comparison view, you can easily determine what changes between the passing and failing version of a test.

Comparing changes between tests

Within mabl, users can easily access a full comparison view of the changes between two versions of the same test starting at the test details page. Click on any test name to access this view, then the "Compare" tab. Additionally, clicking on the name of a test from the Activity feed (link) will take you to a diff of the changes made.

📘

Limitation

Test or flow information such as name, description and labels are not version controlled. This information is also known as test or flow metadata.

• Test metadata includes name, description, test labels, associated DataTables, and test case IDs.
• Flow metadata includes name and flow labels.

When viewing a change you're not limited to just two contiguous versions such as version 5 and 6, but can compare any version against any other version, even those that exist on a branch.

You can also click directly into steps to view more details about that step, as not all changes will impact the actual name of the step shown in the UI.

🚧

Diffing flows

When reviewing changes between test versions, you must click into reusable flows to compare changes between flow versions. Flows feature their own version tracking and must be viewed separately.

Comparing changes between flows

Similar to tests, the flow details page has its own version comparison. You can access this page, or click Compare changes of any flow within a test to view a diff view specific for that flow.