Flaky Tests - Fighting Nightmares

"A liar will not be believed even if he tells the truth" - Aesop

A test can also be such a liar: Unreliable tests are living nightmares for anyone who writes automated tests or even pays attention to their results. Sometimes they pass, sometimes they don't, and therefore do not give a valid statement about the state of the software. In the worst case, they can impair the credibility of the entire test suite. It doesn't matter whether you write unit, integration or end-to-end tests, you can counter them in any way you like.

I've spent hours and hours on such tests, and I want to share my path through them and the lessons learned from them: So that together we can avoid or even get rid of these nightmares.

Transcript

38. Cypress._.times(10, () => { describe('Description', () => { it('runs 10 times', () => { //... }); }); });
40. describe('Customer login', () => { let customer = {}; beforeEach(() => { // Set application to clean state cy.setInitialState() .then(() => { // Create test data return cy.setFixture('customer'); }) }): // … tests will start below })
43. { "retries": { // Configure retry attempts for `cypress run` // Default is 0 "runMode": 2, // Configure retry attempts for `cypress open` // Default is 0 "openMode": 0 } }