Jenkins: Run Serenity acceptance tests without failure - maven

Question

I'm trying to achieve the following:
Run a set of Serenity (plus Cucumber) tests as part of a build pipeline
Collect the reports regardless of whether all tests passed or not (they are especially useful in failures obviously)
In the case of test failures only, then email the contributors
Never fail the build because of a failed acceptance test as this pipeline is for the commit CI. Only want to fail if there are broken acceptance tests in the Nightly.
So with all that in mind I set off attempting to configure the build:
stage ('Serenity') {
steps {
// For the Delivery CI build don't fail on regression failure
sh 'mvn clean verify -pl regression -DskipCuke=false'
}
post {
always {
publishHTML([allowMissing: true, alwaysLinkToLastBuild: true,
keepAll: true, reportDir: 'regression/target/site/serenity',
reportFiles: 'index.html', reportName: 'Serenity',
reportTitles: ''])
}
failure{
echo 'There are regression suite failures.'
script {
currentBuild.result = 'SUCCESS'
}
emailext attachLog: true, body: 'Find Attached',
compressLog: true, recipientProviders: [[$class:
'CulpritsRecipientProvider']], subject: 'Broken Regression Tests',
to: 'dennis#dennis.ru'
}
}
}
However it does not work as I cannot reset the value of currentBuild.result to 'SUCCESS'. So I could all || true to the mvncommand, but that would mean that I can't email about the broken regression tests.
So I am wondering if anyone else out their has dealt with this in some clever way. Do I need to assign an exit code or something, and would that involve overriding the default shell parameters in Jenkins?
Any help much appreciated.

Answer 1

I think you would need to put a try/catch around the shell (so run it in a script{} block), and do your email in the catch. Then you can keep the build set to SUCCESS.

Answer 2

I actually solved this in a slightly different manner to #Rob's suggestion, but the key to it was understanding that what I wanted to do needed to use the script block with the returnStatus flag. I prefer this to a try-catch, as I am actually expecting (unfortunately) this to fail from time to time, and so would prefer to branch this below.
stage ('Serenity') {
steps {
script{
// For the Delivery CI build don't fail on regression failure
def bddPassed = ( sh ( returnStatus:true, script:'mvn clean verify -pl regression -DskipCuke=false') == 0 )
if( !bddPassed ){
echo 'There are regression suite failures.'
def mySubject = "Regression Test Failure: ${env.JOB_NAME} - Build# ${env.BUILD_NUMBER}"
def myBody = "Hi<br/>Please go to <a href='${env.BUILD_URL}Serenity'>the Serenity Report</a> to see more<br/>";
emailext attachLog: true,
mimeType: 'text/html',
body: myBody,
compressLog: true,
recipientProviders: [[$class: 'CulpritsRecipientProvider']],
subject: mySubject,
to: 'xxxxxxx'
}
publishHTML([allowMissing: true, alwaysLinkToLastBuild: true,
keepAll: true, reportDir: 'regression/target/site/serenity', reportFiles: 'index.html',
reportName: 'Serenity', reportTitles: ''])
}
}
}