CI/CD & DevOps / Quiz
Retry Roulette
Retries turn red into green. Sometimes that is resilience; sometimes it is a real race condition getting a fake alibi. Know which is which.
- Difficulty
- Hard
- Format
- Quiz
- Points
- 200
- Estimate
- 11 min
// MISSION BRIEF
Your Mission
Every retry is a bet that the failure was noise. This quiz interrogates that bet: when retries are legitimate, when they launder product bugs, what pass-on-retry should mean, and why non-idempotent tests make retries lie twice.
Scoring: timed quiz; accuracy first, speed bonus for fast clean runs.
// FIRST CONTACT
Battle teaser
A checkout test fails 1 run in 5, passes on retry. Before blaming the test, consider:
- AIt may be a real race in the product; retries make CI green while users still hit the bug at the same rate
- BTests, not products, are always the flaky party
- C1-in-5 is within normal tolerance; ignore it
- DThe CI hardware is the only realistic culprit
Answers, scoring, hints, and the full battle stay sealed.
// SKILL TAGS
ci-cdflaky-testsretriestest-strategy