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SE Radio 572: Gregory Kapfhammer on Flaky Tests

SE Radio 572: Gregory Kapfhammer on Flaky Tests

Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers vor 3 Jahren

0:00

42:36

Gregory Kapfhammer, associate professor at
Allegheny College, discusses the common problem of 'flaky tests'
with SE Radio's Nikhil Krishna. Flaky tests are test cases that
unreliably pass or fail even when no changes are made to the
source code under test or to the test suite itself, which means
that developers can't tell whether the failures indicate bugs
that needs to be resolved. Flaky tests can
hinder continuous integration and continuous development by
undermining trust in the CI/CD environment. This episode examines
sources of flaky tests, including physical factors such as CPU or
memory changes, as well as program-related factors such as
performance issues. Gregory also describes some common areas that
are prone to flaky tests and ways to detect them. They discuss
tooling to detect and automatically mark flaky tests, as well as
how to tackle these issues to make tests more reliable and even
ways to write code so that it's less susceptible to flaky
tests.