Gregory Kapfhammer's guest appearances

Gregory Kapfhammer

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Gregory Kapfhammer, associate professor at Allegheny College, discusses the common problem of ‘flaky tests’ with SE Radio’s Nikhil Krishna. Flaky tests are test cases that unreliably pass or fail even when no changes are made to the source code under test or to the test suite itself, which means that developers can’t tell whether the failures indicate bugs that needs to be resolved.  Flaky tests can hinder continuous integration and continuous development by undermining trust in the CI/CD environment. This episode examines sources of flaky tests, including physical factors such as CPU or memory changes, as well as program-related factors such as performance issues. Gregory also describes some common areas that are prone to flaky tests and ways to detect them. They discuss tooling to detect and automatically mark flaky tests, as well as how to tackle these issues to make tests more reliable and even ways to write code so that it's less susceptible to flaky tests.

<p>Gregory Kapfhammer, associate professor at Allegheny College, discusses the common problem of ‘flaky tests’ with SE Radio’s <a href="https://www.se-radio.net/team/nikhil-krishna/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Nikhil Krishna</a>. Flaky tests are test cases that unreliably pass or fail even when no changes are made to the source code under test or to the test suite itself, which means that developers can’t tell whether the failures indicate bugs that needs to be resolved.  Flaky tests can hinder continuous integration and continuous development by undermining trust in the CI/CD environment. This episode examines sources of flaky tests, including physical factors such as CPU or memory changes, as well as program-related factors such as performance issues. Gregory also describes some common areas that are prone to flaky tests and ways to detect them. They discuss tooling to detect and automatically mark flaky tests, as well as how to tackle these issues to make tests more reliable and even ways to write code so that it's less susceptible to flaky tests.</p>

SE Radio 572: Gregory Kapfhammer on Flaky Tests

Dr. Kapfhammer and his team focus on research related to flaky software tests, which are tests that produce inconsistent or unpredictable results. Why are tests flaky? How can we identify them and stop them in their tracks. He talks to Scott about the results of his research and practical tips for improving tests is to ensure that they are robust and reliable. Web: https://www.gregorykapfhammer.com/GitHub: https://github.com/gkapfhamLinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/GregKapfhammerMastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@gkapfhamTwitter: https://twitter.com/GregKapfhammer"A Survey of Flaky Tests", Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 31:1, 2022, https://www.gregorykapfhammer.com/research/papers/Parry2022/"Evaluating Features for Machine Learning Detection of Order- and Non-order-dependent Flaky Tests", Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, 2022, https://www.gregorykapfhammer.com/research/papers/Parry2022a/"Surveying the Developer Experience of Flaky Tests", Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering – Software Engineering in Practice Track, 2022, https://www.gregorykapfhammer.com/research/papers/Parry2022b/

<p>Dr. Kapfhammer and his team focus on research related to flaky software tests, which are tests that produce inconsistent or unpredictable results. Why are tests flaky? How can we identify them and stop them in their tracks. He talks to Scott about the results of his research and practical tips for improving tests is to ensure that they are robust and reliable. </p><ul><li>Web: <a href="https://www.gregorykapfhammer.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.gregorykapfhammer.com/</a></li><li>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/gkapfham" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://github.com/gkapfham</a></li><li>LinkedIn: <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/GregKapfhammer" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.linkedin.com/in/GregKapfhammer</a></li><li>Mastodon: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@gkapfham" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fosstodon.org/@gkapfham</a></li><li>Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/GregKapfhammer" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/GregKapfhammer</a></li><li>"A Survey of Flaky Tests", Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 31:1, 2022, <a href="https://www.gregorykapfhammer.com/research/papers/Parry2022/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.gregorykapfhammer.com/research/papers/Parry2022/</a></li><li>"Evaluating Features for Machine Learning Detection of Order- and Non-order-dependent Flaky Tests", Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, 2022, <a href="https://www.gregorykapfhammer.com/research/papers/Parry2022a/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.gregorykapfhammer.com/research/papers/Parry2022a/</a></li><li>"Surveying the Developer Experience of Flaky Tests", Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering – Software Engineering in Practice Track, 2022, <a href="https://www.gregorykapfhammer.com/research/papers/Parry2022b/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.gregorykapfhammer.com/research/papers/Parry2022b/</a></li></ul>