Taming Flaky Tests: Trisha Gee on Developer Productivity and Testing Best Practices
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Apr 18, 2025
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insights INSIGHT
Definition and Nature of Flaky Tests
Flaky tests are intermittent tests that sometimes pass and sometimes fail under the same conditions. - They commonly occur in integration and UI tests involving databases or external services.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Strategies to Manage Flaky Tests
Identify flaky tests so you can treat them differently or rerun them automatically. - Separate flaky tests from critical tests to avoid ignoring genuine failures and improve build reliability.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Reducing Test Flakiness Tactics
Adjust and be smart with timeouts in UI and service tests to reduce flakiness. - Optimize test setup by ensuring shared resources like databases start once to speed tests and reduce flaky results.
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This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.
In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Trisha Gee about the challenges and importance of addressing flaky tests, their impact on developer productivity and morale, best practices for testing, and broader concepts of measuring and improving developer productivity.
Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4iiUC6a
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