Glossary
A flaky test produces inconsistent results when the relevant code and expected behavior have not changed. Causes can include timing, shared state, infrastructure and external dependencies.
Repeated unexplained failures make developers less willing to trust a release gate. Preserve the original failure and investigate what changed in the environment or fixture before accepting a later pass.
Teams inspect the failing assertion and artifacts, isolate mutable test data, replace arbitrary waits with observable conditions and assign an owner to the cause. Retrying may help diagnose a failure but does not fix it.
Zerocheck records the exact test revision, step screenshots, errors and every attempt. A transient AI-service error can be retried once in the same browser; a pass after that stays labeled flaky. Assertion failures are not retried.