Find async work that escapes test teardown
Background polling continues after a test completes and changes the next test's state.
- Focused work estimate
- 3h 30m + prerequisites
- Priority in the scenario
- High
- Engineering practice
- Resource lifecycle · Testing
Estimated field mix
- Quality engineering80%
- Developer tooling20%
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
- Track owned timers, subscriptions, and requests.
- Cancel owned work during teardown.
- Fail the test on unhandled late rejections.
Implementation constraints
- Do not suppress process-level rejection reporting.
Verification to include
- Complete a polling test with clean teardown.
- Inject an ignored cancellation and detect the leaked work.
Deliverables
- Async lifecycle repair.
Rollout and recovery
Enable leak detection for the affected suite before expanding coverage.
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.