Mark Chavez

One of the things I use to fix inconsistent tests is to use RSpec’s bisect command. What it does is divide the whole test suite into smaller groups and does its best to return a command to reproduce the failing test.

I learned bisect together with the concept of random seed. Apparently, RSpec randomizes the order of tests in the suite. This means you can pass a particular seed when running the tests bundle exec rspec spec --seed <seed> and it’ll run the same order of tests given the seed.

Given this information, we can combine seed and bisect to possibly determine the root cause of the issue(s).

$ bundle exec rspec spec --seed <seed> --bisect

More reading: https://medium.com/skills-matter/find-the-cause-of-randomly-failing-tests-with-rspec-bisect-dfe9ee2a70c2