Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Flaky tests are like meme stocks — many people have them, but no one knows what to do with them. Today, we will change that by diving into some common causes and, more importantly, solutions for flickering tests in Elixir. Elixir has many great primitives that let us run tests asynchronously, including immutable data, lightweight processes, and the Ecto SQL sandbox. Running tests asynchronously can greatly speed up your test suite, but can also increase the chance of flaky tests.

Testing and Quality Assurance can be endless tasks. That’s why testing teams need metrics to measure and quantify their work and success. Testing metrics provide tangible ways to measure the progress of testing, as well as the readiness to deploy a product. One of the most common and useful metrics is code coverage. Many testers consider it a good practice to write test cases that provide maximum code coverage and verify the expected and wanted behavior of the software.

If you have ever seen the 1976 movie ‘All the President’s Men’ you may remember the phrase “follow the money.” The idea behind this is that political corruption could be exposed merely by looking at financial transfers between parties. In testing, I like to give a slight tweak on this phrase and say, ‘follow the revenue.’ What does this mean? Plainly, we should focus most of our testing efforts in the ways that we will see the most positive return.