On today's episode we chat with Prof. Gregory Kapfhammer, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Allegheny College, and a specialist in the subject of flaky tests. He breaks down his definition of what makes a test flaky, how you can solve for it, and automated solutions that take some of the guesswork and busywork out of avoiding them altogether.
Episode Notes
There is a ton of great research to be found on Prof. Kapfhammer's website, including:
- Flaky Tests: Finding and fixing unpredictable and harmful test cases
- Database Testing: Automatically testing relational database schemas
- Web Testing: Detecting and repairing poor responsive web page layout
We've written a bit about how Stack Overflow is upping its unit testing game and how you can evaluate multiple assertions in a single test.
Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Survivor, for answering the question: Is it possible to find out if a value exists twice in an arraylist?
And thanks to Andre for writing in to let us know that yes, there are folks who code on mobile. He suggests trying:
- Termux https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Main_Page can be used as a
terminal emulator. I have all I need here: Vim, git, node.js, Python
- Markor https://gsantner.net/project/markor.html has a HTML view