Replace wall-clock races with explicit clock control
A trial-expiry test fails around UTC midnight and daylight-saving changes.
- Focused work estimate
- 2h + prerequisites
- Priority in the scenario
- High
- Engineering practice
- Time handling · Unit testing
Estimated field mix
- Quality engineering100%
Field percentages are editorial estimates of the ticket's engineering focus. They total 100%; they are not measured time, proficiency scores, or ownership evidence.
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Project context
A fictional web team reruns red builds until they pass. Shared clocks, leaked state, and unawaited work make failures hard to trust.
Setup prerequisites
- Create a small local application with three deliberately flaky tests using synthetic data and local endpoints.
Preceding work
Complete these dependencies, or supply their agreed outputs before taking this ticket.
Acceptance criteria
- Inject a clock into expiry calculations.
- Cover before, at, and after expiry boundaries.
- Restore real timers after each test.
Implementation constraints
- Business timestamps remain UTC; local zones are test inputs.
Verification to include
- Replay midnight and offset-boundary cases.
- Verify leaked fake timers are detected by teardown.
Deliverables
- Clock-based expiry tests.
Rollout and recovery
Land with the date behavior unchanged except for the documented boundary correction.
Value of the work
For the engineer: Practice controlled diagnosis, isolation, and test reliability measurement.
For the team: Recover useful failure signals and reduce blind reruns without hiding product defects.
Evidence boundaries
Outcome Evidence: Tests, patches, and runbooks are requested deliverables. They become Outcome Evidence only through a qualified Mission and immutable Evidence IDs.
Ownership Evidence: Independent adaptation must be observed under a declared verification policy and cite immutable Evidence IDs. Completing a planning ticket establishes no Ownership Evidence.