A Survey on How Test Flakiness Affects Developers and What Support They Need To Address It
Non-deterministically passing and failing test cases, so-called flaky tests, have recently become a focus area of software engineering research. While this research focus has been met with some enthusiastic endorsement from industry, prior work nevertheless mostly studied flakiness using a code-centric approach by mining software repositories. What data extracted from software repositories cannot tell us, however, is how developers perceive flakiness: How prevalent is test flakiness in developers’ daily routine, how does it affect them, and most importantly: What do they want us researchers to do about it? To answer these questions, we surveyed 335 professional software developers and testers in different domains. The survey respondents confirm that flaky tests are a common and serious problem, thus reinforcing ongoing research on flaky test detection. Developers are less worried about the computational costs caused by re-running tests and more about the loss of trust in the test outcomes. Therefore, they would like to have IDE plugins to detect flaky code as well as better visualizations of the problem, particularly dashboards showing test outcomes over time; they also wish for more training and information on flakiness. These important aspects will require the attention of researchers as well as tool developers.
Wed 19 AprDisplayed time zone: Dublin change
14:00 - 15:40 | Session 15: Flaky TestsPrevious Editions / Research Papers at Pearse suite Chair(s): John Micco VMware | ||
14:00 20mTalk | Evaluating Features for Machine Learning Detection of Order- and Non-Order-Dependent Flaky Tests Previous Editions Owain Parry The University of Sheffield, Gregory Kapfhammer Allegheny College, Michael Hilton Carnegie Mellon University, Phil McMinn University of Sheffield DOI | ||
14:20 20mTalk | An Empirical Study of Flaky Tests in Python Previous Editions Martin Gruber BMW Group, University of Passau, Stephan Lukasczyk University of Passau, Florian Kroiß , Gordon Fraser University of Passau DOI | ||
14:40 20mTalk | A Survey on How Test Flakiness Affects Developers and What Support They Need To Address It Previous Editions DOI | ||
15:00 20mTalk | Practical Flaky Test Prediction using Common Code Evolution and Test History Data Research Papers Martin Gruber BMW Group, University of Passau, Michael Heine BMW Group; Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Programming Systems Group, Norbert Oster Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Programming Systems Group, Michael Philippsen Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Programming Systems Group, Gordon Fraser University of Passau Pre-print | ||
15:20 20mTalk | A Qualitative Study on the Sources, Impacts, and Mitigation Strategies of Flaky Tests Previous Editions Sarra Habchi Ubisoft, Guillaume Haben University of Luxembourg, Mike Papadakis University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Maxime Cordy University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Yves Le Traon University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg DOI |