Have you heard of “flaky tests”?

There are a lot of 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
* Remove external dependencies via Intelligent Virtualization
* Use Visual Assertions instead of Functional Assertions

The demo will be done using the following and a sample code will be shared with the participants
* [Specmatic](https://specmatic.in)
* [teswiz](https://github.com/znsio/teswiz)
* [Applitools Visual AI](https://applitools.com)

Learning Outcomes:
* Explore the real reason for flaky tests
* Implement Visual Assertions instead of Functional Assertions to increase test coverage, while reducing code and increasing test stability
* Use Intelligent and Dynamic Virtualization to remove external dependencies

While there are many reasons for flaky tests, I will focus on a few specific aspects of the same in this session.
This will be a demo-based session to show a concrete example of how one can reduce flaky tests in a complex product environment. The tools used in the demo are mainly to show the concept - teams can use whatever tools that work for them.

I have been speaking in conferences and events since the past 13 years and have spoken in some of the following conferences in the past:
Agile USA
Agile India
Selenium Conference
Appium Conference
StarWest
TestBash
vodQA
TestTalks
Future of Testing
StepIn
Unicom

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