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Why can I tell a test is flaky but never find out why?

79

Opportunity

Detecting that a test is flaky is mostly solved; several tools do it reliably across reruns. Diagnosing the specific root cause is not. LLMs evaluated on real-world flaky test datasets achieve F1 scores above 0.88 for detection but drop below 0.57 on the same inputs when asked to identify root cause. The few automated repair tools only handle order-dependent or implementation-dependent flakiness and fail on resource contention, async timing, and environment drift. Developers spend hours reading logs and adding print statements, then watch the failure refuse to reproduce locally.

Why it matters

Root cause attribution is the missing step that turns a flakiness detector from a dashboard metric into a tool that actually reduces CI time.

How I score the opportunity

The Opportunity Score is my own read, not a measurement: how much it hurts, how often it bites, and how little exists to solve it today. Higher means I think it is more worth building.

Severity7/10

How much pain it causes when it shows up.

Frequency9/10

How often people actually run into it.

Whitespace8/10

How little good tooling exists for it today.

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