steps-desync.md

title	description	keywords	author	ms.author	ms.date	ms.topic	ms.assetid	ms.service	ms.custom
Test report steps are out of sync	Understand what causes test step order discrepancies in test reports. See how to reconcile test report step order in App Center Test.	test cloud, steps, skipped	lucen-ms	lucen	05/11/2022	troubleshooting	0b5ef2ec-0962-47ca-9279-f149f5bca569	vs-appcenter	test

Test report steps are out of sync

[!INCLUDE Retirement announcement for App Center]

App Center Test creates test reports that synchronize each test and test step across devices used. To organize the reports, Test relies on the filenames and order of the screenshots it takes.

If your test suite runs on multiple devices, and allows devices to take different paths through the test code, test steps might appear out of order, skipped, or duplicated in the report. The report summary doesn't count tests with these symptoms as failures.

The following pseudocode examples demonstrate this issue and a workaround.

Pseudocode to reproduce the issue

This example creates discrepancies in the test report if both of the following conditions apply:

• The test is running on multiple devices.
• At least one device takes each code path.

if(bool)
{
    // code to run if true
    app.Screenshot("True");
} else 
{
    // code to run if false
    app.Screenshot("False");
};

Pseudocode workaround

In the following pseudocode, since both code paths create the same screenshot names and sequence, the test report can reconcile both paths to the same test step.

if(bool)
{
    // code to run if true
    app.Screenshot("Result");
} else 
{
    // code to run if false
    app.Screenshot("Result");
};