Continuous Deployment means running all your tests, all the time. That means tests must be reliable. We’ve made a science out of debugging and fixing intermittently failing tests. When I say reliable, I don’t mean “they can fail once in a thousand test runs.” I mean “they must not fail more often than once in a million test runs.” We have around 15k test cases, and they’re run around 70 times a day. That’s a million test cases a day. Even with a literally one in a million chance of an intermittent failure per test case we would still expect to see an intermittent test failure every day. It may be hard to imagine writing rock solid one-in-a-million-or-better tests that drive Internet Explorer to click ajax frontend buttons executing backend apache, php, memcache, mysql, java and solr. I am writing this blog post to tell you that not only is it possible, it’s just one part of my day job.
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