0fc66fedcb
Standardize draft articles with YAML frontmatter including title, date, topics, related, and abstract. Expand README drafts section into a table listing all drafts with topics. Add "Testing Telos" to published articles.
15 lines
1.2 KiB
Markdown
15 lines
1.2 KiB
Markdown
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title: "On Flakiness"
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date: 2026-04-20
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topics: [philosophy, epistemology, craft]
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related: []
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abstract: >
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A flaky test is the software-testing expression of Heraclitus' river — you can never step into the same test run twice. Rather than quarantining or deleting, flakiness ought to be read as a signal that one of our background assumptions about determinism is wrong, and interrogated on those terms.
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---
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On Flakiness — or, Heraclitus and the Non-Deterministic Test. You have direct pain here from the Appium Mac2 multi-monitor work. A flaky test is the software-testing expression of Heraclitus' river[^1] — you can never step into the same test run twice. But a flaky test isn't nothing; it's a signal that one of your background assumptions about determinism is wrong. The usual move is to quarantine or delete; the philosophical move is to ask what the flakiness is telling you about your model of the system. Martin Fowler's "Eradicating Non-Determinism in Tests"[^2] is the standard reference but deserves to be argued with rather than cited.
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[^1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/
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[^2]: https://martinfowler.com/articles/nonDeterminism.html
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