Everything has a cost. And today, I want to talk about the costs we rarely mention in test automation—financial cost and trust.
The financial side is often heard but not really felt. We spend hours in meetings that yield no clear results, affecting team efficiency and wasting time and money.
The second cost, trust, is the currency we trade when we ask for more responsibilities or resources—and our leaders have to decide whether to trust us or not.
🔁 The Problem: Tests that Fail… Sometimes
In test automation, we use the term flaky to describe tests that are unstable—tests that pass sometimes, and fail other times, without any changes in the code.
You run the test 10 times on your machine and it passes. But when it's part of the full suite, it randomly fails. You rerun the suite to isolate the issue… and now it works again.
💸 Where Invisible Costs Start Adding Up
This is where the hidden costs begin to surface:
- Time spent investigating “why it failed.”
- Manual reruns to reproduce the issue.
- Interrupting developers to ask about expected behaviors.
- QA losing focus while chasing phantom failures.
All this while the clock keeps ticking.
Not only are you burning hours—you’re losing the team’s confidence in automation.
⚠️ When the Test Suite Stops Being Useful
This directly impacts the team. When we say “we have automation,” people assume:
- Most of the system is covered.
- Every new release will be validated by running the suite.
But if only 20% of tests are consistently reliable, the value drops fast.
Automation becomes more of a liability than a safety net.
🧩 What Can We Do About It?
We know maintaining the suite is part of the job. Each team might take a different path, but some common strategies include:
- Controlled use of retry logic in specific test scenarios.
- Temporarily disabling flaky tests and tracking them in a technical backlog.
- Rewriting unstable tests from a new perspective.
- In extreme cases, migrating to a more stable infrastructure.
Whatever the path, we can’t afford to delay decisions. Automation is a shared responsibility, not something one person carries alone.
🗣️ Communicating is Leading
If something fails, say it clearly.
Explain what happened, why it failed, what the impact is, and how long fixing it might take.
Because when confidence is gone, the issue isn’t just “a flaky test”—it’s the credibility of your quality process that’s at stake.
🎯 Final Thought: Automation is Also a Product
Test automation is not “just another tool.” It’s the product that validates the product your customer actually cares about.
That’s why our communication must be clear, transparent, and focused on continuous improvement.
Each day, our goal is not just to automate more, but to deliver more value with less noise and greater confidence.
💬 What about you?
Have flaky tests ever drained time or trust in your team?
What strategies have helped you bring stability back to your pipeline?
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