Have you heard of “flaky tests”?

There are a lot of articles, blog posts, podcasts, conference talks about what are “Flaky tests” and how to avoid them.

Unfortunately, I do not agree with the above ideas, and I would term these as anti-patterns for fixing flaky / intermittent tests.

We need to understand the reasons for flaky / intermittent tests. Some of these reasons could be because of issues like:

• Timing issues (i.e. page loading taking time)
• Network issues
• Browser-timing issues (different for different browsers / devices)
• Data related (dynamic, changing, validity, etc.)
• Poor locator strategy (ex: weird & hard-wired xpaths / locators)
• Environment issue
• Actual issue in the product-under-test

In this session, with the help of demos, we will look at the following techniques you can use to reduce / eliminate the flakiness of your test execution:

• Reduce number of UI tests.
• Use Visual Assertions instead of Functional Assertions.
• Remove external dependencies via Intelligent Virtualization.

Demo will be done using the following and sample code will be shared with the participants

• Specmatic
• teswiz
• Applitools Eyes