Test Flakiness

What is Test Flakiness?

Test flakiness is the condition where tests intermittently pass and fail without any code change, typically from timing races, ordering dependencies, shared state, or brittle selectors. It is one of the most damaging problems in automation: once a suite is flaky, teams stop trusting failures, ignore red builds, and let real defects through. Combating flakiness means designing for determinism—auto-waiting instead of sleeps, isolated state, resilient locators. QI attacks the two biggest sources directly with Playwright's auto-waiting and its self-healing engine for shifting UIs.