Originally reported by: Jurko Gospodnetić (BitBucket: jurko, GitHub: jurko)

This is a usability related enhancement suggestion.

When running tests what I really want to know first is:

• Did anything unexpected happen?

which includes both:

• Whether there were any test failures/errors?
• Whether any tests marked xfail suddenly started passing?

The first I can get easily at first glance - either by running the tests with the -x option or by checking the final summary line color (green/red). The latter is a problem though because in order to find whether there were any xpassed test I have to concentrate a lot harder and either:

• Scan the test summary for xpassed test result indicators (capital letter X) which can be difficult to discern from expected xfailed (lower letter x) results.
• Read the final colored summary line to see if any xpassed test results occurred.
• Run the tests with the '-r X' option and read whether the summary displays any xpassed test results.

One of my projects has a lot of tests marked xfail and it started to bug me that I often waste a lot of time and interrupt my flow & concentration by having to check the test results in detail just to see if there were any xpassed test results.

My suggestion would be to:

• Use a different color (e.g. blue?) if you would otherwise color it green by at least one xpassed test result was encountered.

• Use an exit code other that a simple 0=success in such cases.

• Possibly color individual error (E), failed (F) & xpassed (X) test result indicators red or red/blue.

  You might not want to use the new xpassed result related coloring when running with disabled assertions (-O) and you displayed a warning about this possibly causing failing tests to be marked as passed, e.g. when running using an older Python interpreter version.

  The whole enhancement could possibly be made configurable as well.

  Hope this helps.

  Best regards,
  Jurko Gospodnetić

• Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/pytest-dev/pytest/issue/449