[dudzik]

I've worked on the project in the article so I can give some perspective on our handling of intermittently failing tests.

Generally, I agree with your sentiment. Intermittently failing test are eroding trust in the codebase. In our case there are practical challenges with the size of our test base. Not everybody has context on every part of the codebase. This makes it really hard for people to decide if a test is intermittently failing and decide to remove it. The other issue is that at the size of our test base, we are introducing more intermittently failing tests than we can eradicate effectively. To combat this problem we build a test-onboarding system that tests test for common issues. Once a test enters the codebase we are disabling the tests if they are failing and then passing for the same commit too many times so that an individual developer doesn't have to make the decision.