The impact of flaky tests on historical test prioritization on chrome
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Test prioritization algorithms prioritize probable failing tests to give faster feedback to developers in case a failure occurs. Test prioritization approaches that use historical failures to run tests that have failed in the past may be susceptible to flaky tests as these tests often fail and then pass without identifying a fault. Traditionally, flaky failures like other types of failures are considered blocking, i.e. a test that needs to be investigated before the code can move to the next stage. However, on Google Chrome, flaky failures are non-blocking and the code still moves to the next stage in the CI pipeline. In this work, we explain the Chrome testing pipeline and classification. Then, we re-implement two important history based test prioritization algorithms and evaluate them on over 276 million test runs from the Chrome project. We apply these algorithms in two scenarios. First, we consider flaky failures as blocking and then, we use Chrome's approach and consider flaky failures as non-blocking.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it