Improving the reliability and quality of Nextflow pipelines with nf-test

The workflow management system Nextflow, together with the nf-core community, builds an essential ecosystem in Bioinformatics. However, ensuring the correctness and reliability of large and complex pipelines is challenging. To provide this crucial component to the community, we developed the testing framework nf-test. It introduces a modular approach that enables pipeline developers to test individual process blocks, workflow patterns, and entire pipelines in isolation. nf-test is based on a syntax similar to Nextflow DSL2 and provides unique features such as snapshot testing and smart testing to save resources by testing only changed modules. Already adopted by dozens of pipelines and serving as the new standard testing framework for nf-core, nf-test improves robustness and reliability in pipeline development. In this talk, I will give an overview of nf-test's capabilities, the improvements it has brought to the Nextflow community, and will highlight new features from the past year. This includes optimizations to minimize execution time and to implement continuous integration. Moreover, I will introduce nf-test's plugin system and provide an overview of available plugins, especially for Bioinformatics. I'll also demonstrate through various examples how the community has adapted it to their own needs and outline future plans for the framework.