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Interview Question
CI pipelines are blocked by flaky integration tests. How do you triage and stabilize pipelines?
Key Points to Cover
- Identify flaky tests with historical run data
- Isolate infrastructure vs code test flakiness
- Add retries with quarantine for known flaky tests
- Fix root causes (timeouts, race conditions)
- Parallelize and optimize test environments
Evaluation Rubric
Identifies flaky tests systematically30% weight
Separates infra vs code issues30% weight
Proposes retries/quarantine and fixes20% weight
Stabilizes pipelines effectively20% weight
Hints
- 💡Retry storm can hide real failures.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- ⚠️Applying retries to all failing tests without proper analysis, masking genuine bugs.
- ⚠️Focusing solely on test code fixes without investigating underlying infrastructure or environment issues.
- ⚠️Ignoring flaky tests, allowing them to accumulate and degrade pipeline trustworthiness.
- ⚠️Not having a clear process for defining what constitutes a 'flaky' test versus a legitimate failure.
- ⚠️Failing to document or communicate the implemented strategies and the status of flaky tests to the team.
Potential Follow-up Questions
- ❓How to track flaky tests over time?
- ❓Should flaky tests block releases?
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