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SeniorReportingObservabilityCI/CDData Architecture

Design a Scalable Test Reporting System

Design a centralized reporting system that aggregates test results from multiple frameworks, teams and execution environments.

The Problem

Multiple teams use different automation frameworks and execution environments. Design a centralized system that aggregates results and provides actionable quality insights.

Requirements

  • Accept results from multiple frameworks
  • Normalize test execution data
  • Store historical results
  • Support dashboards
  • Track flaky tests
  • Track failure trends
  • Support team and application-level reporting
  • Integrate with CI/CD

High-Level Architecture

Client / CI-CD Pipeline
Test Orchestrator
Execution / Platform Services
Test Workers
Application Under Test
Results + Observability

Architecture Components

Result Ingestion API — receives execution results.

Normalization Service — converts framework-specific results into a common model.

Message Queue — decouples result ingestion from processing.

Processing Service — calculates metrics and trends.

Test Result Store — stores execution history.

Analytics Layer — identifies trends and patterns.

Dashboard — provides team and application-level views.

Alerting Service — notifies teams about important quality signals.

Senior QA Perspective

The reporting system should focus on actionable quality information rather than simply displaying pass and fail counts. I would normalize results from different frameworks, preserve execution history and calculate metrics such as failure trends, flaky-test rates, execution duration and defect correlation. Observability should help teams move from 'what failed?' to 'why is quality degrading?'.

Interviewer Follow-ups

  • How would you normalize results from different frameworks?
  • How would you identify flaky tests?
  • How would you handle millions of execution records?
  • Which metrics would you expose to engineering leadership?
  • How would you correlate test failures with deployments?
  • How would you design the ingestion API for high throughput?

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