If you’ve ever tended to plants, you’ve likely encountered garden pests. When you start to see signs of these seemingly innocuous, sometimes microscopic critters, you know it’s time to take action. Otherwise, a few discolored or spotted leaves could soon multiply, compromising the entire organism.
Why am I, a software engineer, telling you about gardening? Because flaky tests are the garden pests of software development. Just as keeping garden pests under control is essential to the health of your plants, eradicating flaky tests is essential to the health of your software development process.
Developers are intimately familiar with flaky tests and the pain and toil they cause. However, technology leaders often miss their significance, or even dismiss them as a small inconvenience. That’s a mistake. If you care about your development team and its goals, it’s absolutely critical to understand the impact of flaky tests on the broader development process.
