Your Tests Aren’t Flaky, You Are! | Richard Bradshaw

Flaky this, flaky that, the only things I like flaky are my puff pastry and a Cadbury’s Flake. However, a week doesn’t go by without seeing some activity in the community on the subject of flaky automated checks. Most recently was this lengthy post, with masses of analysis by a team at Google on where they believe their flaky checks come from. Some useful insights in there, mostly around the size of the check and the tools used. I feel they missed the all important part, you, me! the person who actually created the automated check in the first place. All flaky automated checks come from us.

Automated checks have become an essential part of most teams' approach to testing and trying to build a quality product. They’re important for many many reasons, we’ll discuss though during the talk. But, it’s important to remember where these checks come from, they come from us. More specifically from the knowledge we have on the tools being used and most importantly our applications and their architectures. I view automated checks as algorithms. Algorithms that are designed and implemented by us. Two important parts there to avoid flakiness in the final automated check. The design and the implementation. I feel far too much effort and focus in on the implementation, and we all know what happens if you implement bad design, right?

In this talk I intend to break down the process of designing and implementing automated checks, going deep into the areas that I believe are critical to creating automation that returns real value to the team, checks that aren’t flaky, checks that don’t result in some poor person continuously playing the role of broken flaky automated check fixer! I’ve played that role, it sucks!

Takeaways:

- An appreciation of the skills required to design good automated checks
- An appreciation of the skills required to implement a good automated check
- How these skills differ, and how the whole team need to be involved
- The importance of continuously reviewing our automated checks for implementation, risks and value added

Видео Your Tests Aren’t Flaky, You Are! | Richard Bradshaw канала Selenium Conference