SE Radio 572: Gregory Kapfhammer on Flaky Tests

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.