How to reduce flakiness of your automated tests?
Software testing is an inevitable part of the entire software development and deployment cycle, which is directly linked to the quality of the end products. In addition to testing for errors, bugs, and other discrepancies, it is also important to check the consistency of the test results. Sometimes, the results may vary for the same test code, making the process unreliable; failures due to inconsistent test results are called flaky tests. Flaky tests tend to hinder the developmental process, hide the bugs in code, increase total costs, and slows down the overall progress.
Flaky tests are highly unpredictable with higher fluctuation rate; there is no reliability on whether they would pass and provide desired results. Dealing with flaky tests is a critical challenge of automated tests and it becomes important to eliminate any fluctuating end results and improve the quality. Hence, companies are taking necessary measures to reduce the flakiness and create a reliable and stable product.
Reasons for flakiness in test automation
Flaky tests are an indication of unreliable test results, which will affect the quality and hit the brand adversely. It is essential for organization to identify and eliminate flaky tests for improving the quality. Flakiness may occur due to a number of reasons; the popular ones include:
Poorly written tests: Among all the other reasons, a poorly written test case is the most commonly occurring one. A poor test case will not give the results as expected, and often lead to fluctuation in the end result; thereby, creating a negative impact on the overall effectiveness of the process. Flakiness arising due to such reasons can be easily avoided by investing in good resource who can write best and unique test scripts.
Not having a strategic framework: Frameworks are a critical parameter to perform testing activities successfully. They comprise a set of rules/guidelines to design, create, and manage test cases. In scenarios where a strategic testing framework is missing, they may lack having an efficient test handling method, coding SOPs, standard repositories, resource access protocol, and a lot more. Without a standard framework in place, the test result may experience flakiness showing inconsistent results.
Shared test environments: Organizations often tend to share infrastructure, operational processes, and teams across multiple projects, to save on cost and resources. The shared environment can lead to overlapping of testing processes giving rise to serious conflicts. Further, the share environment may not prove to fix emergencies, delay deployment time, and doesn’t guarantee superior quality, leading to flaky tests. Enterprises should avoid using shared test environment to control and manage flakiness.
Issues of synchronization: Synchronization focuses on keeping test automation and AUT (application under test) in sync. In the event of failing to do so, the test result may be subjected to flakiness, showing inconsistent results. Hence, to avoid flaky tests, it is important to handle the issues of synchronization.
Tests dependent on each other: Having tests dependent on each other is a bad testing practice, as it doesn’t provide the flexibility to behave and assert as expected. If the tests do not execute independently, they might cause flakiness in the test results. Hence, it is important to understand the objective and create and run tests as per the requirement.