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Re:Spark joy by running fewer tests by hinkley on Thursday June 11, 2020 @05:53PM (#23493683)
In talking to people about this problem, a common misconception I hear is that "well it only fails 1% of the time (so why should I care?)"

Developers don't think in percentages. Our experiences are based on how frequently something happens, not the percent of the times it happens. In a CI build, where we are agressively building many times a day, your one bad test is going to fail every week or two.

Now add two dozen more tests that do the same, and now builds are failing 2x a day on average and more frequently during crunch times and every few months the build will fail 4, 5 times in a row. And for some reason this happens right when someone actually needs a build now because they broke something and everyone is waiting for them to fix it. Talk about stressful.

Every day is "all the time" to most people, and 5 builds in a row might be "hours" (because you have to keep babysitting it). These are serious broken windows and that is how you should treat them.

Re:Spark joy by running fewer tests by l0b0 on Thursday June 11, 2020 @09:50PM (#23495189)
The worst thing is you end up normalizing failure - nobody even bothers checking whether it's a "real" failure until it's failed a few times in a row. At that point you might have introduced other test failures which nobody noticed, or someone might have built on top of the broken code, making a fix harder, and so on and so on.
Re:Spark joy by running fewer tests by hinkley on Friday June 12, 2020 @03:51PM (#23503065)
Indeed. This pattern though is often the point at which an intervention is possible. Almost like it has to happen repeatedly before you can get consensus to stop it.