1.4Platform-Specific Tips for QA

GitHub Actions

• Use the actions/upload-artifact and actions/download-artifact actions to pass test results between jobs
• The services keyword spins up Docker containers (databases, message queues) as sidecars for integration tests
• Use workflow_dispatch inputs to let QA trigger test runs against specific branches or environments manually

GitLab CI

• rules and only/except control when jobs run -- use them to skip expensive tests when only docs change
• artifacts:reports:junit parses JUnit XML and shows test results inline in merge requests
• Review apps can deploy each merge request to a temporary environment for manual testing

Jenkins

• Use Jenkinsfile (declarative or scripted pipeline) over freestyle jobs for reproducibility
• The Blue Ocean plugin provides a modern UI for pipeline visualization
• Shared libraries let you reuse pipeline logic across multiple projects

CircleCI

• Orbs are pre-packaged pipeline steps. The cypress/orb and playwright/orb can save hours of setup
• Workspaces persist data between jobs in a workflow (similar to GitHub Actions artifacts but more lightweight)
• Test splitting with circleci tests split distributes tests across parallel containers automatically