Fighting Test Flakiness: A Disease that Artificial Intelligence Will Cure

[presentation]
by
Tariq King
Summary: 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making it possible for computers to diagnose some medical diseases more accurately than doctors. Such systems analyze millions of patient records, recognize underlying data patterns, and generalize them for diagnosing previously unseen patients. A key challenge is determining whether a patient's symptoms and history are attributed to a known disease or other factors. Software testers face a similar problem when triaging automation failures. They investigate questions like, Is the failure due to a defect, environmental issue, or nondeterministic test script? Is there current or historical evidence to support one belief over another? Join Tariq King as he describes how test failures and flakiness can be modeled for machine learning (ML) as causal disease-symptom relations. Learn how to extend continuous integration (CI) tools with ML classifiers that, once trained, can predict the source of failures. Tariq shares his experiences using this approach to clean up test failures and flaky tests in CI pipelines. Join Tariq in the fight to find a cure for test flakiness!

About the Presenter

Tariq King is the senior director and engineering fellow for quality and performance at Ultimate Software. With more than fifteen years’ experience in software testing research and practice, Tariq heads Ultimate Software’s quality program by providing technical and people leadership, strategic direction, staff training, and research and development in software quality and testing practices. Tariq is a frequent presenter at conferences and workshops, has published more than thirty research articles in IEEE- and ACM-sponsored journals, and has developed and taught software testing courses in both industry and academia. His primary research interest is engineering autonomous self-testing systems. He is cofounder with Jason Arbon of the Artificial Intelligence for Software Testing Association. Contact Tariq via LinkedIn.

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