Test Failure Notifications: Get Alerted in Slack, Not CI Logs

Your CI pipeline runs tests on every push. When tests fail, how does your team find out? If the answer is “someone checks the GitHub Actions tab,” you have a notification problem. Failures sit unnoticed for minutes or hours while developers context-switch to other work.

The Problem: Nobody Checks CI Proactively

Here’s what typically happens when tests fail in CI:

Developer pushes code and moves on to the next task
CI runs tests in the background
Tests fail — but nobody’s watching
Eventually someone notices the red X on the PR (or doesn’t)
By the time they investigate, they’ve lost the mental context

The feedback loop is broken. CI runs tests, but the results sit in a dashboard nobody monitors in real-time.

What Teams Do Instead

1. Check CI manually

Requires remembering to check after every push
Developers context-switch away while waiting for CI
Easy to miss failures on shared branches like main

2. GitHub email notifications

Buried in inbox noise alongside PR reviews, mentions, and issue updates
No summary of which tests failed or why
No link to the full report

3. Custom scripts with curl and Slack webhooks

Brittle, hard to maintain, lives in CI config
Usually just sends “build failed” with no detail
No filtering by branch or failure severity
Every team reinvents this from scratch

4. CI provider’s built-in notifications

GitHub Actions has no native Slack integration for test results
GitLab notifications are noisy and lack test-level detail
No structured test result data — just “job passed/failed”

Better: Structured Test Notifications

What you actually want is a notification that tells you:

Which tests failed — not just “the build broke”
A link to the full report — one click to see errors, traces, screenshots
Branch and commit context — what triggered the failure
Filtering — only notify on branches you care about

How Gaffer Handles Test Notifications

Gaffer sends test results to Slack, webhooks, and GitHub commit status after every upload. No custom scripts, no maintenance.

Slack Integration

Connect your Slack workspace in project settings. After each test run upload, Gaffer posts a summary:

Pass/fail counts and overall status
Direct link to the hosted test report
Branch, commit SHA, and trigger context
Failed test names for quick triage

Notification Triggers

Choose when to get notified:

All runs — every test upload sends a notification
Failures only — only hear about problems
Consecutive failures — alert when a test fails multiple runs in a row, filtering out one-off noise

Branch Filtering

Don’t get spammed by feature branch noise. Configure notifications per branch pattern:

Only notify on main and release/*
Skip dependabot/* and draft PRs
Different channels for different branches

Webhooks

For custom integrations, Gaffer sends HMAC-SHA256 signed HTTP POST payloads to any endpoint. Payloads include test run results, project context, and report links. See the webhook docs for the full payload schema.

Use webhooks to:

Post to Microsoft Teams, Discord, or any chat tool
Trigger PagerDuty alerts for critical test suites
Update a status page or internal dashboard
Feed into your existing alerting pipeline

GitHub Commit Status

Gaffer sets commit status checks on your PRs automatically. Developers see test results without leaving GitHub — green check or red X directly on the commit.

Setting Up Test Failure Notifications

Step 1: Upload Test Results from CI

# GitHub Actions example
- name: Run tests
  run: npm test

- name: Upload to Gaffer
  if: always()
  uses: gaffer-sh/gaffer-uploader@v2
  with:
    api-key: ${{ secrets.GAFFER_UPLOAD_TOKEN }}
    report-path: ./test-results

Step 2: Connect Slack

In your Gaffer project settings, click “Connect to Slack” and authorize the integration. Select a channel and choose your notification trigger.

Step 3: Configure Triggers

Pick the trigger that matches your workflow:

Trigger	Best For
All runs	Small teams that want full visibility
Failures only	Teams that only want to hear about problems
Consecutive failures	Filtering out flaky one-off failures

That’s it. Your next CI run will notify your team automatically.

Comparing Test Notification Approaches

Approach	Setup	Maintenance	Test Detail	Filtering
Check CI manually	None	None	Full (if you find it)	None
GitHub email notifications	Built-in	None	Minimal	Limited
Custom Slack webhook script	High	High	Whatever you build	Whatever you build
CI provider notifications	Built-in	Low	Job-level only	Limited
Gaffer	Low	None	Full report link + summary	Branch, trigger type

Beyond Notifications

Notifications are the entry point. Once you’re uploading test results, you also get:

Hosted test reports — shareable URLs for every run
Flaky test detection — automatic identification of unreliable tests
Test analytics dashboard — pass rate trends, duration tracking, failure patterns

Get Started

Gaffer’s free tier includes Slack integration, webhook support, and GitHub commit status with 500 MB of storage and 7-day retention.

Set Up Test Notifications - Free

Gaffer