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Why Your CI Pipeline Is Lying to You - Simon Stewart
Managing Flaky Tests Strategies for Trustworthy CI Pipelines
📌 EuroSTAR 2026 in Oslo (June 15–18) — the podcast will be there. Community perk: 15% off all tickets with the code EUROSTAR15 Details and tickets
"A flaky test can actually sometimes be a good test because it's highlighting things." - Simon Stewart
In this episode, I talk with Simon Stewart, professional software developer and former lead of the Selenium project for over 10 years, about one of the most frustrating problems in software testing: flaky tests. Simon reveals why a flaky test isn't always a bad test – sometimes it's actually exposing real production risks that your team needs to address. We dive into practical strategies for handling flakiness in CI pipelines, from gatekeeping techniques used at Meta to knowing when it's actually okay to delete tests. You'll learn why assigning ownership to individuals (not teams) is crucial, and how to use test flakiness as valuable signal rather than just noise.
Simon Stewart has been a professional software developer since before the millennium began. He was the lead of the Selenium project for over a decade and is the co-editor of the W3C WebDriver and WebDriver Bidi specs.
As well as browser automation, Simon is also interested in monorepos, blazing fast byte-for-byte reproducible builds, and scaling software development efficiently. He draws on his experience working in Open Source, ThoughtWorks, Google, and Facebook. He was the tech lead of Facebook’s build tool team, and is currently working on projects using Bazel, for which he’s the maintainer of several rulesets.
Simon lives in London with his family and dog.
Highlights:
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By Richard Seidl | Software Development & Testing ExpertManaging Flaky Tests Strategies for Trustworthy CI Pipelines
📌 EuroSTAR 2026 in Oslo (June 15–18) — the podcast will be there. Community perk: 15% off all tickets with the code EUROSTAR15 Details and tickets
"A flaky test can actually sometimes be a good test because it's highlighting things." - Simon Stewart
In this episode, I talk with Simon Stewart, professional software developer and former lead of the Selenium project for over 10 years, about one of the most frustrating problems in software testing: flaky tests. Simon reveals why a flaky test isn't always a bad test – sometimes it's actually exposing real production risks that your team needs to address. We dive into practical strategies for handling flakiness in CI pipelines, from gatekeeping techniques used at Meta to knowing when it's actually okay to delete tests. You'll learn why assigning ownership to individuals (not teams) is crucial, and how to use test flakiness as valuable signal rather than just noise.
Simon Stewart has been a professional software developer since before the millennium began. He was the lead of the Selenium project for over a decade and is the co-editor of the W3C WebDriver and WebDriver Bidi specs.
As well as browser automation, Simon is also interested in monorepos, blazing fast byte-for-byte reproducible builds, and scaling software development efficiently. He draws on his experience working in Open Source, ThoughtWorks, Google, and Facebook. He was the tech lead of Facebook’s build tool team, and is currently working on projects using Bazel, for which he’s the maintainer of several rulesets.
Simon lives in London with his family and dog.
Highlights: