Post #1417021
2026-04-17 17:52 UTC
@mhoye @cks in our shop, in the dev groups that my team supports, tests fail for a variety of reasons. The codebases run on real silicon of released products and ones still in development, in a fleet of test machines that have poor consistency discipline. A test could fail because someone committed broken code, but also because the Test Automation team pushed out a broken (ironically, untested) test harness update, because a rack had its power supply silently replaced under-spec...
Replies (1)
-
@gnomon@mastodon.social 2026-04-17 17:54
@mhoye @cks every failing test begins with a full investigation and that work can cross a dozen different team jurisdictions and take three months... or it could conclude in ten minutes when a dev realizes "oh shit, I accidentally included some WIP code in that commit which breaks everywhere but on my specific machine". (That this kind of human error is even possible, let alone that its blast radius can include everyone who depends on the test suite, is a problem but a different one.)