🧩 The Edge Case | Which Flaky Test Should You Fix First? ✅

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Hi there,

A flaky test rarely looks urgent. It fails, passes on retry, and everyone moves on.

But every retry leaves a tax. Someone waits, investigates, reruns the job, or slowly stops trusting the suite.

One detail in Selenium 4.48 caught my eye. Released on August 27, the Selenium project has started recording flaky tests on its trunk branch and reporting the worst offenders every week.

That is a useful habit for any QA team, regardless of which automation tool you use.

If you had to choose one flaky test to fix first, try this five-step routine:

1. Count first-attempt failures

Do not let a successful retry erase the original signal. Track how often the test fails before eventually passing.

2. Classify the failure

Mark each occurrence as a likely product defect, test-code problem, test-data problem, environment failure, or unknown. A pattern often appears once the evidence is grouped.

3. Add the investigation cost

Estimate how many minutes people spend reviewing logs, rerunning jobs, reproducing the issue, or explaining the failure. A test that fails less often can still be the most expensive one.

4. Add the business risk

A flaky checkout, login, or payment test deserves more attention than a low-impact cosmetic check, even when both fail equally often.

5. Fix the highest score, then prove it

Use a simple priority score:

first-attempt failures × business-risk score × average investigation minutes

After the change, watch the first-attempt pass rate for at least a week. A green retry is not proof that the flake has gone.

If you are a junior tester

Pick one recurring failure and create a short evidence pack containing:

• Timestamp and test name
• Failure message
• Screenshot, trace, video, or relevant log
• Browser and environment
• Retry result
• Your leading root-cause hypothesis

That gives your team something actionable. It can also become strong portfolio or interview evidence because it shows investigation, not only test execution.

If you are an experienced tester or QA lead

Publish a weekly offenders table containing:

• First-attempt failure count
• Retry-pass count
• Age of the flake
• Current owner
• Business-risk rating
• Estimated investigation time

If a test must be quarantined, give it an owner and an expiry date. Otherwise, quarantine quietly becomes permanent storage for ignored risk.

The goal is not to eliminate every flaky test overnight. It is to stop paying for the same unexplained failure every week.

Yours in testing,

Farid Vaswani

Community Partner

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