Quarantine a flaky test without making it optional forever
A timing-sensitive test is retried until it passes, hiding a rising failure rate and extending every pull request.
- Focused work estimate
- 4h + prerequisites
- Priority in the scenario
- High
- Engineering practice
- Flake management · Policy as code · Test analytics
Estimated field mix
- DevOps60%
- Quality engineering40%
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 TypeScript monorepo has twelve packages and a local CI simulator. Pull requests wait for redundant work, stale caches occasionally pass broken changes, and superseded runs continue consuming executors. Create synthetic package graphs and fake check APIs; no hosted CI credentials or production repositories are supplied.
Setup prerequisites
- Dependency graphs
- Process exit codes
- Test isolation
Preceding work
Complete these dependencies, or supply their agreed outputs before taking this ticket.
Acceptance criteria
- First-attempt and retry outcomes remain separate
- Quarantine has owner, reason, expiry, and tracking reference
- Expired quarantine fails the policy check
Implementation constraints
- Do not classify a test as flaky from one failure; use the supplied deterministic failure history.
Verification to include
- Quarantine the documented test and keep its outcomes visible.
- Expire or omit ownership and confirm the pipeline blocks rather than silently skips.
Deliverables
- Quarantine registry, policy check, and trend fixture
Rollout and recovery
Limit quarantine to named tests and review before expiry.
Value of the work
For the engineer: Practice treating CI as a versioned delivery system with correctness, latency, and recovery constraints.
For the team: Review a pipeline that reduces wasted compute without allowing stale or skipped checks to approve changes.
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.