GTAC 2015: Your Tests Aren't Flaky

http://g.co/gtac Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1L9hGYqCAgjZyXE9ch4Toh4ziuYYkB2OiMCdFpgfTko0/pub Alister Scott (Automattic) Flaky tests are the bugbear of any automated test engineer; as someone (probably Alister) once said “insanity is running the same tests over and over again and getting different results”. Flaky tests cause no end of despair, but perhaps there’s no such thing as a flaky or non-flaky test, perhaps we need to look at this problem through a different lens. We should spend more time building more deterministic, more testable systems than spending time building resilient and persistent tests. Alister will share some examples of when test flakiness hid real problems underneath the system, and how it’s possible to solve test flakiness by building better systems.