Muting Test Failures

TeamCity provides a way to "mute" any of the currently failing tests so they will not affect build status for future builds. Muting will only affect builds which fail on "at least one test failed" build failure condition but not others: if any of the other failure conditions apply to your build (non-zero exit code, etc.), it will still fail even if failing tests are muted.

This feature is useful when some tests fail for some known reason, but it is currently not possible to fix them. For example, the responsible developer is on vacation, or you are waiting for the system administrators to fix the environment, or the test is failing intentionally, for example, if the required functionality is not yet written (TDD). In these cases you can mute such failures and avoid unnecessary disturbance of other developers.

When a test is muted, it is still run in the future builds, but its failure does not affect the build status. The test can be unmuted manually on a specific date or after a successful run. Also, tests can be muted only in a single build configuration or in all the build configurations of a specific TeamCity project.

Your build script might need adjustment to make the build green when there are failing but muted tests. Make sure that the build does not fail because of other build failure conditions (e.g. "Fail if build process exit code is not zero") in case the only errors encountered were tests failures. See also the related issue TW-16784.

How to mute tests

The Mute/unmute problems in project permission required to mute tests is granted to Project administrator and System administrator by default. You can mute a test failure from:

• The Projects page

• The Project overview page

• The Build Configuration home page

• The Current Problems tab

On the build results page you can select several test failures (or all) to be muted or unmuted: select the tests, click the Investigate.. button and specify the mute options.

Note that you can start investigation of the problem simultaneously with muting the failure. When muting a test failure, you can specify conditions when it should be unmuted: on a specified date or when it is fixed. Alternatively, you can unmute it manually.

On the build results page you can view the list of muted test failures, their stacktraces and details about the mute status:

From the Project Home page you can navigate to the Muted Problems tab to view all problems muted in all build configurations within project: