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by vasco 1040 days ago
For anyone following at home, once you've identified a test as flaky, your next action should be to turn it off. Nothing good comes from keeping flaky tests around. Detect them as soon as you can and either fix them _right there_ or skip them.

I've used this in practice in a company of ~80 developers at the time, applied it because read about it in some Dropbox papers, and have since seen it work in 2 other companies. Skip your flaky tests!!

1 comments

I suppose the difference between flaky tests and typos in tags/missing tags is that the latter is less about flaky-ness, and more about the engineer deciding not to fix the tagging issue and merging anyway. In Terraform, tags are fairly easy to fix and don't require the resource to be recreated so it feels like it should be a quicker fix then fixing/refactoring tests.

I think the easier we make it for engineers to fix tagging issues, the more likely it'll be for engineers to take action. Send me an email asking me to read the company's wiki page on tagging policy and I'll delete the email; tell me I have a typo on line 8 as soon as I open my pull request, I'll fix it and move on.