lecture 15 of 160 completed

Fixing flakiness across a whole suite

One flaky test is a bug. Fifty flaky tests is a process problem, and you fix it differently.

What you'll learn

  • How to fix flakiness across a whole suite rather than one test
  • Why measuring comes before fixing
  • How to agree a rule that stops it returning

You already know how to fix a single flaky test. This lecture is about the situation you will inherit: a suite where forty tests fail at random and everyone has given up.

You cannot debug forty tests one by one. You need a different approach.

Step 1: measure before you fix anything. You need to know which tests fail, how often, and whether it is getting better. Cypress Cloud does this for you, or you can save your test results to a file and count failures per test over a week.

Do not skip this. Without numbers, "the suite is flaky" is a feeling, and you cannot show progress to a manager who is asking why testing takes so long.

members only

Keep reading with the full course

The Foundations track and the first 5 lectures of each framework are free. This lecture is part of the paid course, which unlocks every lecture, all three frameworks, and downloads.

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