On 08/04/14 14:43, Andrew Halberstadt wrote:
On 07/04/14 11:49 AM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 6:12 PM, Ted Mielczarek <t...@mielczarek.org>
wrote:
If a bug is causing a test to fail intermittently, then that test loses
value. It still has some value in that it can catch regressions that
cause it to fail permanently, but we would not be able to catch a
regression that causes it to fail intermittently.
To some degree, yes, marking a test as expected intermittent causes it
to lose value. If the developers who work on the relevant component
think the lost value is important enough to track down the cause of
the intermittent failure, they can do so. That should be their
decision, not something forced on them by infrastructure issues
("everyone else will suffer if you don't find the cause for this
failure in your test"). Making known intermittent failures not turn
the tree orange doesn't stop anyone from fixing intermittent failures,
it just removes pressure from them if they decide they don't want to.
If most developers think they have more important bugs to fix, then I
don't see a problem with that.
I think this proposal would make more sense if the state of our
infrastructure and tooling was able to handle it properly. Right now,
automatically marking known intermittents would cause the test to lose
*all* value. It's sad, but the only data we have about intermittents
comes from the sheriffs manually starring them. There is also currently
no way to mark a test KNOWN-RANDOM and automatically detect if it starts
failing permanently. This means the failures can't be starred and become
nearly impossible to discover, let alone diagnose.
So, what's the minimum level of infrastructure that you think would be
needed to go ahead with this plan? To me it seems like the current
system already isn't working very well, so the bar for moving forward
with a plan that would increase the amount of data we had available to
diagnose problems with intermittents, and reduce the amount of manual
labour needed in marking them, should be quite low.
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