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by rio517 1689 days ago
Wow. That works like really poor technical leadership. Fixing flaky tests (as opposed to deleting them) is indeed time consuming, but it is a far cheaper choice than getting to the point your test suite is untrustworthy.

There may be a point where the cost of ownership for a specific test exceeds its utility, but the way to resolve that is usually to reevaluate your code and supporting tests. Suppressing flaky tests seems a very unwise choice.

Perhaps under extreme circumstances and with unhealthy code bases there may be a case for this, but I struggle to imagine it.

1 comments

That is a fair argument. Not all organizations have the bandwidth to measure and manage stability of builds. Some companies build internal tools / dev productivity team for this purpose. There are always right intentions to comment out the flaky test with the mindset of coming back to it, but it is also a very low priority item in most cases when you have to ship new features.

Fixing flaky tests can very commonly take longer than writing new tests.