What is Flaky Test Management?
Flaky Test Management involves detecting, monitoring, and reducing flaky tests — tests that sometimes pass and sometimes fail without any code changes.
How Does Flaky Test Management Work?
Teams use tools that detect inconsistent test results over time, isolate flaky tests, and categorize them for investigation and remediation to improve overall pipeline stability.
What Are the Benefits of Flaky Test Management?
- Increases trust in automated test suites.
- Prevents false negatives that block deployments.
- Reduces developer frustration.
- Improves the reliability of CI/CD pipelines.
How Can Flaky Test Management Reduce Mean Time to Resolution?
Stable test suites ensure that genuine failures are immediately clear, eliminating wasted time chasing false positives and accelerating real issue resolution.
What are the Challenges of Flaky Test Management?
- Identifying the root causes of test flakiness can be hard.
- Flaky tests are often intermittent and environment-dependent.
- Requires ongoing monitoring and maintenance.
Leading Tools – of Flaky Test Management
These tools help detect, isolate, and manage flaky tests—those that fail intermittently without code changes—improving test suite reliability and developer trust:
- Buildkite Test Analytics – Identifies flaky tests and visualizes failure patterns across CI pipelines.
- Flaky Test Handler (GitHub Actions) – Automatically retries or flags inconsistent test outcomes in GitHub-based workflows.
- Test Retry Plugins (Jest, JUnit) – Extend popular testing frameworks to rerun flaky tests and record patterns.
- CircleCI Test Insights – Provides metrics on test performance, flakiness, and trends across runs.
Other Great Observability Tools for Test Stability
While not dedicated to flaky test management, these tools help surface underlying issues that lead to flaky behavior:
- LOCI – Detects instability and behavioral anomalies in compiled software artifacts during CI, helping prevent flakiness by catching root causes before tests are run.
- Sentry
- Datadog APM
