Flaky tests are the bugbear of any automated test engineer; as someone 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 is no such thing as a flaky or non-flaky test, perhaps we need to look at this software testing problem through a different lens.
We should spend more time building more deterministic, more testable systems than spending time building resilient and persistent tests. This presentation shares some examples of when test flakiness hid real problems underneath the system, and how it is possible to solve test flakiness by building better systems.
Video producer: https://developers.google.com/google-test-automation-conference/