End to end and smoke tests give a really valuable angle on what the app is doing and can warn you about failures before they happen. However, because they’re working with a live app and a live database over a live network, they can introduce a lot of flakiness. Beyond just changes to the app, different data in the environment or other issues can cause a smoke test failure.

How do you handle the inherent flakiness of testing against a live app?

When do you run smokes? On every phoenix branch? Pre-prod? Prod only?

Who fixes the issues that the smokes find?

  • kersplort@programming.devOP
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    1 year ago

    Polling is certainly useful, but at some point introducing reliability degrades effectiveness. I certainly want to know if the app is unreachable over the open internet, and I absolutely need to know if a partner’s API is down.