In general, I understand, the flake means brittle and inconsistent or uneven. Like the flakes one will have as food.
I'm not a native English. It took me years to understand and correlate between the words 'flake' and 'flakiness'.
Test and Flakiness
There are no Flaky Tests. A test is not flaky anytime.
The responses of a system to a test can be flaky. That is, the response is not deterministic and inconsistent to one's expectation and understanding.
In other words, the responses of the system is unreliable to the same action, data, state and other parameters.
This is not a philosophy of testing or test. In my opinion, it is a misunderstanding that is accepted and passed on in the software engineering.
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| A test is not flaky; the response of a system is flaky. |
Are there no flakiness when testing for services? It exists! That is, the inconsistent behavior of a service for the same set of data, state and other parameters. What is inconsistent in context of a service's response?
Flakiness is not bounded to just GUI It can be with any UI [User Interface]. And, an API is an another user interface which opens up to the bunch of services.
To end,
- It is not Flaky Test.
- It is a flaky response of a system which a test is letting you and me to experience.
- What is a flakiness to one who is testing for security and performance?
- Flakiness is not confined to the UI response or a functional response of a system.
You decide how you should be seeing a test in your suite and label the response of the system you are testing.
