Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers

SE Radio 572: Gregory Kapfhammer on Flaky Tests

<p class="p1">Gregory Kapfhammer, associate professor at Allegheny College, discusses the common problem of ‘flaky tests’ with SE Radio’s <a href="https://www.se-radio.net/team/nikhil-krishna/">Nikhil Krishna</a>. 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.</p>

Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. Every 10 days, a new episode is published that covers all topics software engineering. Episodes are either tutorials on a specific topic, or an interview with a well-known character from the software engineering world. All SE Radio episodes are original content — we do not record conferences or talks given in other venues. Each episode comprises two speakers to ensure a lively listening experience. SE Radio is an independent and non-commercial organization. All content is licensed under the Creative Commons 2.5 license.