Have you heard of “flaky tests”?

Many articles, blog posts, podcasts, and conference talks about what are “Flaky tests” and how to avoid them.

Some of the ideas proposed are:

* Automatically rerun failed tests a couple of times, and hope they pass
* Automatically retry certain operations in the test (ex: retry click/checking for visibility of elements, etc.) and hope the test can proceed

Unfortunately, I do not agree with the above ideas, and I would term these as anti-patterns for fixing flaky/intermittent tests.

We need to understand the reasons for flaky/intermittent tests. Some of these reasons could be because of issues like:

* timing issues (i.e. page loading taking time)
* network issues
* browser-timing issues (different for different browsers/devices)
* data related (dynamic, changing, validity, etc.)
* poor locator strategy (ex: weird & hard-wired xpaths/locators)
* environment issue
* actual issue in the product-under-test

In this session, with the help of demos, we will look at the following techniques you can use to reduce/eliminate the flakiness of your test execution:

* Reduce the number of UI tests
* Use Visual Assertions instead of Functional Assertions
* Remove external dependencies via Intelligent Virtualization

Demos will be done using the following and a sample code will be shared with the participants

* Specmatic
* teswiz
* Applitools Eyes

This will be done as live a demo. 45-60 min is a good time for this session. Internet connectivity will be required.

You can find links to some of my earlier conference videos here - https://www.youtube.com/user/abagmar/videos, and my slides here - http://slideshare.net/abagmar