Software Quality Assurance

A test that fails intermittently is worse than no test, because it trains the team to re-run rather than investigate. Most flakiness traces to a handful of causes: waiting on fixed timers instead of conditions, shared state between tests, dependence on real network calls, and assumptions about ordering.

We tackle existing flakiness first. Adding coverage on top of a suite nobody believes is spending money to make the noise louder.

End-to-end tests through a browser give the most realistic confidence and are the slowest and most brittle to maintain. Unit tests are fast and stable but can all pass while the assembled product is broken. A suite made entirely of either is a suite with a predictable failure mode.

We aim for a deliberate distribution: thorough unit coverage of business rules, integration tests across the seams where systems meet, and a small set of end-to-end tests covering the handful of journeys that must never break — signup, checkout, whatever your equivalent is. That shape runs quickly enough to gate every commit.

Tests that only run when someone remembers are not a safety net. We wire the suite into continuous integration so it runs on every pull request, blocks merges on failure, and reports results where the team already works. Where a full run is too slow to gate a commit, we split it — fast checks on every push, the exhaustive run before deploy.

We also set up the things people discover they needed only during an incident: error monitoring with meaningful alerting, structured logs you can actually search, and a documented rollback path that has been tested at least once outside of an emergency.