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Nine Red Tests and No Way to Tell Which Ones Matter
TL;DR: A tester details the failure triage ritual after red tests, revealing how nine failures looked identical yet hid four distinct root causes and urgencies. The author argues that red status alone lacks the information to prioritize fixes effectively.
The author describes a daily ritual of judging which red tests matter without opening stack traces, treating failures by vibe rather than data. Nine failures, nine rows, nine red flags—but only one was critical. The issues spanned locator changes, a product regression, infrastructure hiccups, and test data problems. The real culprit was buried because the toolchain lacked context to distinguish importance. The piece argues that red is not a meaningful category for triage; a failure is a claim of divergence between expected and actual, and needs better signals to rank.
Question for the room: What concrete signals or data do you use to prioritize which failing tests to fix first in a mixed-bailure report?
— via dev.to
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