Test Flakiness Budget

Test flakiness budget

A flaky test that everyone re-runs until it passes has quietly stopped gating anything, and each new one erodes trust in the whole suite until real failures get re-run away too. The fix is not heroics on each flake but a system: measure the rate, quarantine on sight, and hold every quarantined test to an owner and a deadline. Treat the flake count as a debt with a ceiling.

Method

1. Measure the flake rate and set a budget. A test that passes and fails on the same commit is flaky. Track flips per run and set a ceiling, for example under 0.1 percent of test runs flaky. That number is the line that triggers action.
2. Quarantine the moment a test flakes. Auto-tag it (@flaky, a skip-list, a JUnit category) so it drops out of the merge gate but keeps running and reporting. Data accrues while it stops blocking honest merges.
3. Attach an owner and a deadline to every quarantine. No test enters quarantine without a ticket, a named owner (usually the last author or the code owner), and an expiry, commonly two weeks. An anonymous quarantine is permanent by default.
4. Cap the quarantine size and stop the line when it fills. Set a hard limit, say 10 tests. Cross it and no new features merge until the count comes down. This turns flakiness into a shared cost, not a slow private leak.
5. Burn down by fixing or deleting, never by ignoring. Route each quarantined test through flaky-test-diagnosis to make it deterministic, or delete it if it guards nothing worth the noise. A test that cannot be made reliable and cannot be justified is dead weight.
6. Auto-expire past the deadline. A quarantined test that blows its expiry gets deleted by a scheduled job, not silently renewed. Deletion is honest: the coverage was already zero while the test sat skipped.

Signals

• Can you name the owner and deadline for every currently quarantined test?
• Is the flake rate a tracked, published number rather than a shared feeling?
• Does the quarantine list shrink week over week, or has it become a graveyard?

Boundaries

This is the process around flakes, not the diagnosis of any one: making a specific test deterministic belongs to flaky-test-diagnosis, and fixing races in the code under test to race-conditions. The exact budget and quarantine limits are a team decision; adopt whatever the project already tracks rather than imposing new counters.