Sometimes it becomes very painful that your logback.xml file is not recognized by project. There are different reasons for this:

1. logback.xml is not present in src/main/resources folder of your project. If it’s a maven/gradle project, always keep this file in the specified folder ‘src/main/resources‘
2. Execute follwoing code into your main class and observe the output

// This line should return the path of this file if found otherwise you will see 'null' on console
System.out.println(getClass().getClassLoader().getResource("logback.xml"));

// These lines will also print that if your file has been found in the class path of the project
LoggerContext lc = (LoggerContext) LoggerFactory.getILoggerFactory();
// print logback's internal status
StatusPrinter.print(lc);

logback.xml

<configuration>
    <appender name="SIFT" class="ch.qos.logback.classic.sift.SiftingAppender">
        <discriminator>
            <key>testMethodName</key>
            <defaultValue>unknown</defaultValue>
        </discriminator>
        <sift>
            <appender name="FILE" class="ch.qos.logback.core.rolling.RollingFileAppender">
                <rollingPolicy class="ch.qos.logback.core.rolling.TimeBasedRollingPolicy">
                    <fileNamePattern>build/reports/%d{yyyyMMdd}/separateLogsTestCases/${testMethodName}.log
                    </fileNamePattern>
                </rollingPolicy>
                <append>false</append>
                <encoder class="ch.qos.logback.classic.encoder.PatternLayoutEncoder">
                    <pattern>%d [%4F:%t:%L] - %m%n</pattern>
                </encoder>
            </appender>
        </sift>
    </appender>

    <appender name="STDOUT" class="ch.qos.logback.core.ConsoleAppender">
        <encoder>
            <pattern>%d{HH:mm:ss.SSS} [%thread] %-5level %logger{36} - %msg%n</pattern>
        </encoder>
    </appender>

    <root level="debug">
        <appender-ref ref="STDOUT"/>
        <appender-ref ref="SIFT"/>
    </root>

</configuration>