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---
name: flaky-test-quarantine
title: Flaky Test Quarantine & Deflaking Protocol
category: Strategy & Reliability
testingTypes:
- Reliability
- CI/CD
- Flakiness
frameworks:
- Universal
- Playwright
- Vitest
languages:
- TypeScript
- Python
author: Pramod Dutta (QASkills.sh)
---
# Flaky Test Quarantine & Deflaking Protocol
The standard protocol for identifying, quarantining, and systematically eliminating intermittent or flaky test failures in CI.
## The Quarantine Mental Model
1. **The Trunk Protection Invariant**:
- A flaky test is worse than a broken test because it destroys team trust in CI.
- When a test fails intermittently (>1% failure rate without code changes), quarantine it immediately with a `@quarantine` tag.
- Run quarantined tests on a separate non-blocking schedule while keeping the main pipeline green.
2. **Root Cause Taxonomy**:
- **Type A: Timing & Race Conditions**: Relying on arbitrary timeouts instead of explicit event listeners or locator auto-waiting.
- **Type B: Shared Mutable State**: Leaked database records, un-reset singleton caches, or shared browser sessions.
- **Type C: Non-Deterministic Data**: Unseeded random numbers, floating-point rounding differences, or timezone daylight savings drift.
- **Type D: Resource Contention**: CPU starvation in parallel CI containers leading to socket or process timeouts.
## Deflaking Checklist
- [ ] Replaced any `sleep()` or `waitForTimeout()` with `waitForSelector()` or web-first assertion.
- [ ] Swapped wall-clock timestamps for fixed frozen clock (`vi.setSystemTime`).
- [ ] Replaced shared database rows with unique UUID-tagged entity fixtures.
- [ ] Added network request mock interceptors for external third-party endpoints.
