Developer Survey Seeks Data on Engineering Hours Lost to Flaky CI Tests

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A developer building a tool called Culprit has launched a five-question community survey to quantify the productivity cost of flaky CI tests on engineering teams. Flaky tests — those that pass on retry without any code fix — are said to compound across teams through repeated reruns, investigations, and context-switching. The survey targets engineering roles ranging from senior software engineers to CTOs, asking about team size, weekly hours lost, and current tooling used to manage flaky tests. Respondents are also asked about acceptable pricing for a tool that automatically identifies the commit introducing a flaky test and posts it as a pull request comment. Participants can respond via the comments section or by emailing culprit@megaloop.app, and aggregate results will be shared with all who take part.

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