nodejs / nodejs/build

Measure flakiness of new tests

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enhancement help wanted question
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Description

As discussed in https://github.com/nodejs/TSC/issues/1457, could we somehow have a way for CI to measure the flakiness of new tests before they land? Something like:

  • For every PR, identify tests that are added by the PR (probably tests that run in the PR’s branch that didn’t run for main).
  • Run measure-flakiness on them.
  • Fail CI unless the new tests pass the flakiness cutoff, on all platforms.

This obviously won’t help for existing flaky tests, but I would think that it should prevent most new flaky tests from landing on main; and it would highly motivate contributors to improve their tests, because their PRs would be blocked from landing until they did so.

It also wouldn’t help if a test becomes flaky because of changes to the API that it tests after the test has landed. But still, I think this is better than the status quo.

Related: https://github.com/nodejs/build/pull/3056 cc @nodejs/tsc

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Begin with the existing measure-flakiness command and the CI configuration for nodejs/build; inspect how PR-only tests are identified and how all-platform jobs report results. Done means new tests are selected, flakiness is measured on every platform, and CI blocks a PR when the cutoff is exceeded.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
ci-cd, testing-qa
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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