Flaky test
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Flaky test (or flaky test case) is a software test that exhibits non-deterministic behavior, i.e., it may pass or fail inconsistently without any changes in the underlying code.[1][2] This flakiness can arise from a number of causes, including concurrency issues, timing dependencies, reliance on external systems, or lack of sufficient isolation between tests.[3][4] Flaky tests are problematic in continuous integration environments because they decrease trust in automated test suites and can hide real defects, leading to wasted debugging effort and decreased productivity.[5]
Flaky tests can be mitigated by improving test isolation, controlling sources of nondeterminism (e.g., time and randomness), mocking of external dependencies, and rerunning of tests to confirm failures.[6][7] Flakiness is a well-known issue in large-scale software development, and there are many techniques to tackle it, such as test retries, quarantine mechanisms, or better test design practices.[8] Nevertheless, flaky tests remain an active research area in software engineering, especially for distributed systems and large code bases where nondeterminism is more prevalent.[9]
