Accelerate your
engineering workflow
Elevate code confidence: Find & fix flaky tests, enforce code coverage, and measure engineering impact.
One powerful platform.
Everything you need to take action.
A new approach to building R&D confidence
Fix flaky tests, reduce cost, and measure impact.
BuildPulse identifies flaky tests in your test suite, assesses their impact, mitigates cost, and provides tools to fix them.
Test Analytics.
Identify bottlenecks, tests increasing in duration, and potentially unstable tests.
Granular Code Coverage.
Enforce fine-grain standards, identify blind spots, and monitor product health.
Measuring Team Impact for Engineering Leaders.
Increase velocity, reduce costs, and improve the quality of every release with enhanced DORA and code metrics: pull request throughput, velocity, and quality.
Automate developer busywork.
Workflow automation that takes menial tasks off your developer’s plate, unlocking more time for meaningful work.
Actionable insights alert on stale pull requests, predict review times, enable swift merges, and track bottlenecks - immediately, all in Slack.
"Within a few days of installing BuildPulse, it had identified our flakiest tests and helped us quantify their impact.
We quickly prioritized dealing with those top offenders and our build stability shot up from 78% to 93%."
Josh Goldberg
Lead Engineer
"BuildPulse has been instrumental to our de-flaking efforts. CI for our main web repository used to be extremely reliable and frustrating.
Thanks to BuildPulse, we were able to methodically enumerate flaky tests, prioritize them in terms of disruptive potential, drive them to 0, and keep them at 0 thanks to BuildPulse's actionable daily reports."
Jonathan Unikowski
Lead Engineer
"Flaky tests were a major roadblock delaying our deploys, but BuildPulse helped us get things back on track.
I especially appreciate getting prompt support directly from the founder."
Michael Menne
CTO
"If the problem is rare enough (i.e., flakes every week or so), fix the low hanging fruit and/or retry with the tougher ones. Once it gets worse (and it always does), it's time for real tooling around it, which means BuildPulse."
Rob Sanhiem
VP of Technology
What is the difference between a flaky test and a false positive?
A false positive is a test failure in your test suite due to an actual error in the code being executed, or a mismatch in what the test expects from the code.
A flaky test is when you have conflicting test results for the same code. For example, while running tests if you see that a test fails and passes, but the code hasn’t changed, then it’s a flaky test. There’s many causes of flakiness.
What is an example of a flaky test?
An example can be seen in growing test suites - when pull request builds fail for changes you haven’t made. Put differently, when a test fails and passes without any code change. These failed tests are flaky tests.
What are causes of flakiness?
Broken assumptions in test automation and development process can introduce flaky tests - for example, if test data is shared between different tests whether asynchronous, high concurrency, or sequential, the results of one test can affect another.
Poorly written test code can also be a factor - such as improper polling, race conditions, improper event dependency, or timeout handling for network requests or page loads. Any of these can lead to flaky test failures and test flakiness.
End-to-end tests that rely on internal API uptime can cause test flakiness and test failures.
What's the impact of flaky tests?
Flaky tests can wreck havoc on the development process - from wasted developer time from test retries, to creating bugs and product instability and missed releases, flaky tests can grind your development process to a halt.
What is the best way to resolve or fix flaky tests?
Devops, software engineering, and software development teams will often need to compare code changes, logs, and other context from before the test instability started, and after - adding retries or reruns can also help with debugging. Test detection and test execution tooling can help automate this process as well.
BuildPulse enables you to find, assess impact metrics, quarantine, and fix flaky tests.
What are some strategies for preventing flaky tests?
Paying attention and prioritizing flaky tests as they come up can be a good way to prevent them from becoming an issue. This is where a testing culture is important - if a flaky test is spotted by an engineer, it should be logged right away. This, however, takes a certain level of hygiene - BuildPulse can provide monitoring so flaky tests are caught right away.
What type of tests have flaky tests?
Flaky tests can be seen across the testing process - unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, UI tests, acceptance tests.
What if I don't have that many flaky tests?
Flaky tests can be stealthy - often ignored by engineers and test runs are retried, they build up until they can’t be ignored anymore. These automated tests are automated disruption that slow down developer productivity, impact functionality, and reduce confidence in test results and test suites. Better to get ahead while it’s easy.
It’s also important to prevent regressions to catch flakiness early while it’s manageable.
What languages and continuous integration providers does BuildPulse work with?
BuildPulse integrates with all continuous integration providers, test frameworks, and workflows to combat non-determinism, drive reliable tests, and provide the best developer experience.
How long does implementation/integration with BuildPulse take?
Implementation/integration takes 5 minutes!
