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Testing

Flake rate

Flake rate is the proportion of test runs that fail intermittently without any change to the code under test, and it is the primary measure of whether a test suite can be trusted.

Above roughly one percent, engineers begin re-running failures instead of reading them, and the suite stops functioning as a safety net. Flake is nearly always caused by timing assumptions, shared state between tests, or test data that is not isolated — and it is fixable, though usually by deleting or rewriting rather than by adding retries.

Related terms

  • Self-healing tests

    Self-healing tests use resilient element location strategies — and often a model to resolve ambiguity — so that an automated test continues to work when the underlying markup changes but the user-facing behaviour does not.

  • QA agent

    A QA agent is an LLM-driven tester that explores an application by reading its interface, deciding what to try next, and reporting what appears broken — covering exploratory testing that fixed scripts cannot.

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