Automatically rerun failed Espresso tests on App Automate

Flaky tests slowing you down? Automatically retry failed Espresso suites on BrowserStack App Automate to get more reliable build results and save time.

Flaky tests cause intermittent failures and pipeline delays by forcing manual retries.

BrowserStack’s App Automate solves this by automatically rerunning failed Espresso tests, which distinguishes real bugs from transient issues to improve build reliability, reduce manual effort, and accelerate CI/CD pipelines.

Benefits of rerunning failed tests

Enabling automatic reruns for your Espresso test suites on App Automate provides the following key advantages:

• Identify flaky tests and improve feedback reliability: Automatically rerunning a failed test helps confirm if a failure is persistent (a real bug) or intermittent (a flaky test). This reduces the noise from transient failures, allowing your team to act on real issues faster.

• Improve build stability: By successfully rerunning tests that failed due to temporary issues (like network glitches), you can prevent your entire CI/CD pipeline from being marked as “failed” unnecessarily.

• Reduce manual effort and save time: Eliminates the need for developers and QA engineers to manually investigate and re-trigger builds, allowing them to focus on writing code and finding critical bugs.

Enable reruns using REST API

You can enable the automatic rerun capability by passing the following parameters in your test execution API call:

Rerun only the failed test cases

This is the most common scenario, where you want to retry only the specific tests that fail to overcome flakiness. The build will continue to execute other tests, and only the ones that fail will be added to the rerun queue.

To configure this, set retryTestsOnFailure to true. You can optionally specify testIterations to control the number of retries.

Use the following cURL request:

Rerun the entire session on any failure

This capability is designed for tightly coupled test suites where the success of one test depends on the state set by a previous one. If any test fails, the entire session is aborted and re-executed from the beginning. This ensures that test dependencies are respected in every retry attempt.

To configure this, set both retryTestsOnFailure and runWholeSession to true.

Use the following cURL request:

View rerun results

After your build completes, go to the App Automate dashboard to view all test executions, including any retries.

Tests that were retried are marked with a label indicating the number of attempts (e.g., “3 attempts”).

You can expand the test result to view the logs and metadata for each individual attempt, making it easy to debug why a test failed initially before passing.

The final status of the test (and the build) reflects the outcome of the last attempt.