this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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How much flakiness do you tolerate in end to end tests? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by kersplort@programming.dev to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev
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End to end and smoke tests give a really valuable angle on what the app is doing and can warn you about failures before they happen. However, because they're working with a live app and a live database over a live network, they can introduce a lot of flakiness. Beyond just changes to the app, different data in the environment or other issues can cause a smoke test failure.

How do you handle the inherent flakiness of testing against a live app?

When do you run smokes? On every phoenix branch? Pre-prod? Prod only?

Who fixes the issues that the smokes find?

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[–] Pantoffel@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

Okay I must admit that I do not have much experience with smoke and integration tests. We run end to end tests only and skip running the other two types entirely. They would be covered by the end to end tests anyways.

Perhaps I am lucky in that our software doesn't require us to use many waits at all. Most things are synchronous and those that are not mostly have API endpoints where the status of the process an be safely queried, i.e. a wait(1000) and hope for the best is not necessary, but rather do wait(1000) until isFinished().

And yes, for us it is also a mess of errors popping up when one step in a pipeline fails, where many tests rely on this single step. I don't know whether there is a way to approach this issue neatly. This is surely a chance in the market to be taken.