Dev Tools · 18h ago
Adding --retries 2 to CI Pipeline Hid Bugs for 8 Months
An engineer added retries to a test suite to suppress flaky failures, reducing bug detection probability from 30% to 2.7% per run. A payment double-submit bug shipped because retries masked a race condition. The author argues retries make product knowledge less accurate without improving stability.
Meridian48 take
A cautionary tale that retries in CI are a band-aid that can hide real bugs, not a fix for flaky tests.
Read the full reporting
I Added `--retries 2` to Our Pipeline. It Took Me Eight Months to Understand What I'd Done. →
DEV Community
ci-cdtesting