Building a regression suite your team actually trusts
A test suite that fails randomly gets ignored. A small, reliable one changes how a team releases.
Trillune Engineering5 min read
Many teams have a test suite nobody believes. It fails intermittently, takes an hour and gets re-run until it passes. At that point it provides no information — and releases go back to being manual and nervous.
Start with the journeys that make money
Before chasing coverage percentages, list the handful of flows where a failure costs revenue or trust: sign-up, checkout, booking, payment, the core workflow. Automate those end-to-end first, reliably.
Test at the right level
- Unit tests for business rules and calculations
- Integration tests for database and API boundaries
- Contract tests for third-party and internal APIs
- A small number of end-to-end tests for critical journeys
Treat flakiness as a bug
A flaky test should be fixed or quarantined the day it's noticed. Most flakiness comes from timing assumptions, shared test data or reliance on external services — all fixable with better test design.