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cdCon 2022 – The State of Art in Tackling Flaky Tests

By August 9, 2022October 13th, 2022Blog

CD Foundation is summarizing several key talks from cdCon 2022, held June 7-8, 2022, in Austin, Texas. Full video recordings are available of all talks.

At cdCon 2022, Kohsuke Kawaguchi with Launchable and creator of Jenkins, gives a presentation on Tackling Flaky Tests. Flakiness is a part of the reality for software engineers everywhere, it refuses to go away. This is happening in teams whether or not you know it, it caused frustrations, failed pull requests and adds more stress to hotfix delivery. 

Kohsuke begins the presentation by introducing Flakiness and well-known causes for why flakiness happens. He then follows by sharing measurements done to tackle the problem and shows ways to manage it. Kohsuke then covers psychological barriers along with techniques to measure and escalate flakiness. He then touches on software teams around the world that have tackled this problem, from “idol” companies like Google & GitHub to “next door neighbor” companies showing how they tackle this in teams and seeing how this is a part of a bigger emerging movement. 

Main Sections

  • 0:00 Introduction
  • 0:39 Flaky tests – Why are they a problem?
  • 2:56 Know your enemy
  • 3:36 Well-known causes
  • 4:39 Flakiness is unevenly distributed
  • 6:05 What’s been done?
  • 8:01 Keeping builds
  • 11:19 Psychological Barrier
  • 12:52 Measuring flakiness
  • 18:12 Escalating flakiness
  • 24:27 How do you go from here to there?
  • 27:40 Thank you!