Glossary · AI-native development
Flaky Test
A test that can pass and fail across equivalent runs without a relevant change to the code or intended test environment.
Why it matters
Flakiness weakens verification gates and can train people or agents to ignore real failures or retry until they obtain a false pass.
In practice
Preserve the failing seed and environment, quarantine only with an owner and deadline, then fix uncontrolled time, concurrency, network, order, or shared-state dependencies.
Common confusion
A test that consistently exposes an intermittent product bug is valuable evidence, not necessarily a flaky test.
Related terms
Sources
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