Engineer Documents 48-Hour Method to Reliably Reproduce Elusive Flaky CI Test Failures

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A software developer spent 48 hours creating a structured approach to diagnose tests that pass locally but fail in CI environments, a problem commonly dismissed as 'works for me.' The method centers on four strict rules: no source edits until the failure is reproduced twice, every run must produce a machine-readable artifact, all hypotheses must be written before testing, and unresolved issues get a ticket rather than endless investigation. Instead of immediately debugging code, the engineer reframed the problem by building a condition matrix to identify what environmental factors the failure followed. AI tool MonkeyCode was used to generate ranked hypotheses from captured artifacts, with each suggestion required to have a falsifiable test before any source changes were made. The resulting workflow and tooling are now kept in a reusable tools/ folder, designed to make flaky test investigations reproducible and time-bounded.

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