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The Tyranny of the Flake Equation
Originally posted 2024-06-11 Tagged: software engineering, statistics Obligatory disclaimer: all opinions are mine and not of my employer I once worked with an algorithm whose runtime scaled roughly linearly with the number of rows of data. To date, the largest job we’d ever attempted had taken a few hours.
In my experience, great engineers can sniff out early hints of flakiness and fix them while the exponential is still in the somewhat flat parts of its growth curve, allowing teams to scale smoothly. It allows teams to exponentially flatten the global failure rate while continuing to derive value from individual flaky tests. It’s a powerful solution because it covers a broad class of flake modes, whereas rearchitecting to detect and recover from failed GPUs, irregular network connectivity, etc.
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