DEV Community

Cover image for 🚨 The Silent Killer of Your CI/CD: Flaky Cypress Tests (And How to FINALLY Fix Them)
Sohail Mohammed
Sohail Mohammed

Posted on

🚨 The Silent Killer of Your CI/CD: Flaky Cypress Tests (And How to FINALLY Fix Them)

Hey #devcommunity! 👋

Let's talk about something that haunts almost every modern web developer: flaky tests. Specifically, those maddening Cypress tests that randomly pass, randomly fail, and make you question your sanity.

You know the drill: your feature branch passes all tests, you merge to main, and BAM! CI fails. You rerun, and it passes. Or it fails again, but for a different reason. This isn't just an annoyance; it's a huge drag on productivity, confidence, and release velocity.

I've spent a considerable amount of time wrestling with these demons, and through that struggle, I've distilled a comprehensive approach to not just patch flaky tests, but to eradicate their root causes.

In my latest article, "Fix Flaky Cypress Tests The Right Way," I break down the common culprits and, more importantly, provide a playbook for building genuinely robust and reliable end-to-end tests.

What you'll discover in the article:

  • Beyond cy.wait(): Why simply waiting often masks underlying issues and what to do instead.
  • Environmental Parity: How subtle differences between local and CI environments can wreck your tests.
  • Mastering Assertions: Techniques to write assertions that are resilient to timing and dynamic UI changes.
  • Isolation Patterns: Ensuring your tests are truly independent and don't interfere with each other.
  • Data Management Strategies: Setting up and tearing down test data cleanly.

This isn't about quick hacks; it's about fundamentally changing how you approach E2E testing to achieve stability you can trust.

Stop debugging phantom failures and start building with confidence. Dive into the full guide here:

Fix Flaky Cypress Tests the Right Way! | by Sohail Mohammed | Sep, 2025 | JavaScript in Plain English

Before you blame Cypress for flakiness, check your selectors. They’re the silent culprit behind most broken test suites, and I'll explain…

favicon javascript.plainenglish.io

Let me know in the comments – what's been your biggest struggle with flaky tests? And what's your go-to strategy for fixing them?

#CypressIO #Testing #JavaScript #WebDev #QAAutomation #E2ETesting #SoftwareEngineering #TechArticle #Programming

Top comments (0)