Back in September, US software firm Red Hat suffered a security breach. The incident was not acknowledged until October, but even now the full impact of the breach is unfolding. Japanese car maker Nissan has just confirmed that it was indirectly affected by the Red Hat security breach. As a result of this, detailed contact information for thousands of customers were accessed by hackers. Nissan points out a number of things, including that no financial data was involved in the breach. Additionally, it seems that the number of impacted customers is limited to around 21,000, and these are all customers… [Continue Reading]

1144. This week, we look at the origin of the letter X as the variable for the unknown in algebra. Then, we look at the phrase "how come," explaining why it's more informal than "why" and how its grammar subtly differs from other question words.

That X segment was written by Peter Schumer, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Middlebury College, and it originally appeared on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.

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Burke and Pierce sit down to review a full year of releases, surprises, partnerships, and AI goodies in VS Code from 2025!

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Let’s talk about the dirty secret of our industry.

We’ve all been there. You come in on a Monday morning, check the nightly run, and see red. Again. Not “we broke the build” red, but that annoying, flickering, “it worked yesterday” red. Again.

Your first instinct? Guilt. “I need to fix my script.” “I need to add a better wait.” (NOOOO!) “I need to handle that random pop-up.”

We spend our lives apologizing for these failures. We treat them like they are our failure as testers or automation engineers. And because we’re responsible people, we dive in, and try to fix them. Again.

We should stop apologizing.

As I’ve been saying for years, flaky tests are really a sign of a flaky system. But it goes much more further than that.

Testablity Doesn’t Happen By Chance

When we’re testing software, we can do this in different ways. But we start by thinking about what we want to learn. We then design our tests. Then we get stuck, if the system is not testable (enough).

You can say it’s an architectural failure. The architecture wasn’t designed to be testable. But why is that? Why wasn’t it designed with testability in mind?

To put it bluntly, that is a Leadership Failure.

It means someone, somewhere up the chain, decided that pushing features in was more important than testing them. In the before times, before AI, that was not prudent (I’m being nice here). These days, it’s reckless.

The “Operability” Trap

The problem is that even if we know how we’d like to test, and what we need for that to happen, there are not many people who speak the language. So let’s put it in technical terms, that even developers will understand (ha!)

The first term is Operability. Can you run the system? “Of course you can, you just double click that icon.”

Ok, it may sound stupid, but think about it. Testability is not binary, it’s not a range. And so is Operability. If running a test requires a dedicated DevOps engineer to spin up a Kubernetes cluster that costs $50 an hour, that’s low testability. If all you have is a shared VM, that’s even lower.

Lower testability has a price. Sure, we can jump through hoops to test features like that. But the truth is, If something is “not testable”, chances are it won’t get tested. There’ll be other more easily testable feature we’d go to before that one. Even if it’s more important.

Ok, running is great. When you do run it, and it fails, do you know why?

The “Observability” Gap

This brings us to your second pillar: Observability. And I don’t mean checking the test result.

When the test fails, does the system tell you what happened, or does it just say “500 Internal Server Error”? If you have to dig through three different log files and guess the timestamp to find out why a user creation failed, that’s not a test problem. It’s a testability problem – the observablity mechanisms were not in place to detect and report what actually happens. And with the three logs – maybe they have been, but they sure didn’t make it easy.

Again – observable systems do not happen by accident. Those testability features need to be there from the early design.

And who’s responsible for that?

So, what do we do? We stop fighting the script and start fighting the design. We stop saying “I’ll fix the flaky test” and start saying “We need to make this feature testable.”

We demand logs that make sense. We demand environments we can spin up in seconds, not days. We demand the right to see inside the black box.

That’s on us. With the help of developers and architects. We need to be in the design discussions from the get go. Remember I said leadership failure? Leadership needs to make this happen. And we need to be testability ambassadors.

Next week, on December 30th, I’m hosting a session (in Hebrew) on Understanding Testability. We’re going to talk about these pillars, along with other two pillars (Controllability and Reproducibility) and how to actually get developers to give us the keys to the testability kingdom.

What a way to end the year eh?

Save My Seat!

The post Stop Apologizing for Flaky Tests first appeared on TestinGil.

We just wrapped up our last conference of 2025 in Cologne. While the year has come to a close, we're already looking ahead to what's next. At Text Control, we start planning for the upcoming conference season early by design.

Explore C# 14's powerful features in .NET 10! Boost productivity with extension members, extension operators, field keyword, null-conditional assignment, and more. Write cleaner, safer, and faster code!