Pipeline Triage

Overview

These guidelines gives team members on pipeline triage an idea on the priorities and processes that come with this responsibility. This builds from the information provided in On-Call Rotation.

The Pipeline triage DRI is responsible for analyzing and debugging test pipeline failures. Please refer to the DRI weekly rotation schedule to know who the current DRIs are.

NOTE: For information regarding debugging test pipeline failures, check out Debugging Failing Tests and Test Pipelines

General guidelines

• Fix tests failing in master before other development work: Failing tests on master are treated as the highest priority relative to other development work, e.g., new features. Note that for pipeline triage DRIs, triage and reporting takes priority over fixing tests.
• Follow the pipeline triage guidelines for investigating, reporting, and resolving test failures
• Flaky tests are quarantined until proven stable: A flaky test is as bad as no tests or in some cases worse due to the effort required to fix or even re-write the test. As soon as it is detected, it is quarantined immediately to stabilize CI, fixed as soon as possible, and monitored until it is fixed.
• Close test failure issue (e.g example issue) when the test is moved out of quarantine: Quarantine issues should not be closed unless tests are moved out of quarantine.
• Quarantine issues should be assigned and scheduled: To ensure that someone is owning the issue, it should be assigned with a milestone set and have appropriate ~"quarantine", quarantine with type (e.g. ~"quarantine::bug") and failure with type (e.g. ~"failure::bug") labels.
• Make relevant stage group aware: When a test fails no matter the reason, an issue with related product group label (e.g. ~"group::ide") should be created and made known to the relevant product stage group as soon as possible. In addition to notifying that a test in their domain fails, enlist help from the group as necessary.
• Failure due to bug: If one or multiple test failure(s) is a result of a bug, create a bug issue and provide as much details as possible (e.g. using issue’s Bug template, provide steps to reproduce, relevant screenshots, etc.). Link the all related test failure issues to the bug issue. Apply ~"type::bug", severity, priority, product group, feature category, etc. labels to ensure a fix is scheduled in a timely manner. Test failure issues are used for tracking and investigating purposes, they should not have ~"type::bug" label. If the test failure is a result of a bug, apply ~"failure::bug" label instead.
• Everyone can fix a test, the responsibility falls on the last who worked on it: Anyone can fix a failing/flaky test, but to ensure that a quarantined test isn’t ignored, the last engineer who worked on the test is responsible for taking it out of quarantine.

Triage flow

The flow of triaging the pipelines as a decision tree (nodes link to the relevant sections of the handbook)

flowchart TB
        %% nodes
        slack_channels{check slack channel}
        next_channel(move to next slack channel)
        failed_pipeline(identify failure)
        existing_issue{issue\nalready\nreported?}
        new_issue(create issue if does not already exist)
        tag_pipeline(notate issue in comment on pipeline run)
        incident{incident\nworthy?}
        notify_incident(Notify about escallation)
        open_incident(Open incident)
        update_incident(Update teams about incident)
        eyes(tag pipeline run with :eyes: emoji)
        fire_engine(replace :eyes: with :fire_engine: emoji)
        boom(replace :eyes: with :boom: emoji)
        another_failure{more\nfailures?}
        investigate(investigate root cause for found failures)
        fix_tests(fix tests if possible)
        quarantine_tests(quarantine tests if necessary)
        monitor_incident(participate in incident process)
            tag_issue_for_report(add your emoji to issue for the DRI gem)
            publish_results(publish your results to the triage issue with the DRI gem)
            dri_handoff(handoff to next DRI anything that is still in flight)

        %% external links
        click failed_pipeline "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform/debugging-qa-test-failures/#review-the-failure-logs"
        click new_issue "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform/debugging-qa-test-failures/#create-an-issue"
        click existing_issue "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform/debugging-qa-test-failures/#known-failures"
        click investigate "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform/debugging-qa-test-failures/#investigate-the-root-cause"
        click incident "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/incident-management/#report-an-incident-via-slack"
        click notify_groups "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform/debugging-qa-test-failures/#notify-group-in-all-cases"
        click fix_tests "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform/debugging-qa-test-failures/#fixing-the-test"
        click quarantine_tests "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform/debugging-qa-test-failures/#quarantining-tests"
        click open_incident "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/incident-management/#failure-needs-escalation"
        click tag_pipeline "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform/debugging-qa-test-failures/#linking-issue"
        click eyes "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform/debugging-qa-test-failures/#emoji-used"
        click fire_engine "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform/debugging-qa-test-failures/#emoji-used"
        click boom "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform/debugging-qa-test-failures/#emoji-used"
          click tag_issue_for_report "https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ruby/gems/dri#configuration"
              click publish_results "https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ruby/gems/dri#4-publish"
        click notify_incident "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform/debugging-qa-test-failures/#failure-needs-escalation"
        click update_incident "https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform/debugging-qa-test-failures/#notify-group-in-all-cases"

        %% diagram
        slack_channels -->|failed pipeline run| eyes
              slack_channels -->|no failed pipeline runs| next_channel

                open_incident --> next_channel
               another_failure -->|no| next_channel
        incident -->|yes| notify_incident

                next_channel --> investigate
                next_channel --> publish_results

                subgraph report the failure
                  eyes --> failed_pipeline
                  failed_pipeline --> existing_issue
          existing_issue -->|new failure| new_issue
                  existing_issue -->|existing issue| fire_engine
                    new_issue --> boom
                    boom --> notify_groups
                    notify_groups --> incident
                incident -->|no| tag_issue_for_report
                tag_issue_for_report --> tag_pipeline

                    fire_engine --> tag_issue_for_report
                    tag_pipeline --> another_failure
                    another_failure -->|yes| failed_pipeline
                end

                subgraph escallate issue
                  notify_incident --> open_incident
                  open_incident --> update_incident
          update_incident --> monitor_incident
                end

                subgraph follow up on test failures
                  investigate --> fix_tests
                    investigate --> quarantine_tests
                end

                subgraph end of your day
                publish_results --> dri_handoff
                end

How to triage a QA test pipeline failure

The general triage steps are:

• Report the failure
• Review the failure logs
• Investigate the root cause
• Classify and triage the test failure
• Notify relevant groups about the failure

After triaging failed tests, possible follow up actions are:

• Fixing tests
• Quarantining tests
• Dequarantining tests
• Re-evaluating tests

Report the failure

Your priority is to make sure we have an issue for each failure, and to communicate the status of its investigation and resolution. When there are multiple failures to report, consider their impact when deciding which to report first. See the pipeline triage responsibilities for further guidance.

If there are multiple failures we recommend that you identify whether each one is new or old (and therefore already has an issue open for it). For each new failure, open an issue that includes only the required information. Once you have opened an issue for each new failure you can investigate each more thoroughly and act on them appropriately, as described in later sections.

The reason for reporting all new failures first is to allow faster discovery by engineers who might find the test failing in their own merge request test pipeline. If there is no open issue about that failure, the engineer will have to spend time trying to figure out if their changes caused it.

Known failures should be linked to the current pipeline triage report. However, issues can be opened by anyone and are not linked automatically, so be sure to confirm there is no existing issue before creating one.

1. Search for existing issues that have already been created with the failure::* label. By order of likelihood:
   1. failure::investigating
   2. failure::test-environment
   3. failure::broken-test
   4. failure::flaky-test
   5. failure::stale-test
   6. failure::bug
   7. failure::external-dependency
2. If the issue has already been reported please use the existing issue to track the latest status.
3. If there is no existing issue for the failure, please create an issue using one of classification labels via the steps below.

In the relevant Slack channel:

1. Apply the 👀 emoji to indicate that you’re investigating the failure(s).
2. If there’s a system failure (e.g., Docker or runner failure), retry the job and apply the :retry: emoji. Read below for examples of system failures.
3. If an issue exists, add a 🚒 emoji. It can be helpful to reply to the failure notification with a link to the issue(s), but this isn’t always necessary, especially if the failures are the same as in the previous pipeline and there are links there.
4. If it is a new failure issue, add a 💥 emoji.

Checkout the list of Slack channels for the pipeline-related channels.

Create an issue

Please use this step if there are no issues created to capture the failure. If there is already an issue please skip this step.

1. Create an issue for the test or system failure (if retrying the job does not resolve the latter) in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues using the QA failure template. For failures in CustomersDot tests, open an issue in CustomersDot project.
   • Apply the ~"type::ignore" label to the issue until the investigation is complete and an issue type is determined.
   • Inform the counterpart SET about the failure.
   • For system failures, it may make sense to open an issue in a different project such as Omnibus GitLab, GitLab QA, or GitLab Runner.
   • For staging environment-related failures, you can post a question in #infrastructure-lounge, or open an issue in the infrastructure project
   • Ask for help in #quality if you’re unsure where to file the issue.
2. In the relevant Slack channel, add the 💥 emoji and reply to the failure notification with a link to the issue.
3. Add the issue as a related issue to the current pipeline triage report. If multiple issues are the result of 1 bug, add the bug issue to the report instead.

Review the failure logs

The aim of this step is to understand the failure. The results of the investigation will also let you know what to do about the failure. Update the failure issue with any findings from your review. For more information about the failure logs, check out Debugging Failing Tests and Test Pipelines

Investigate the root cause

Depending on your level of context for the test and its associated setup, you might feel comfortable investigating the root cause on your own, or you might get help from other SETs right away.

When investigating on your own, we suggest spending at most 20-30 minutes actively trying to find the root cause (this excludes time spent reporting the failure, reviewing the failure logs, or any test setup and pipeline execution time). After that point, or whenever you feel out of ideas, we recommend asking for help to unblock you.

Note: Please avoid logging in via gitlab-qa and all the other bot accounts on Canary/Production. They are monitored by SIRT and will raise an alert if someone uses them to log in. If it is really needed to log in with these accounts, please give a quick heads-up in #security-department that someone is logging into the bot and tag @sirt-members for awareness.

Below is the list of the common root causes in descending order of likelihood:

1. Code changes: Check if the new code was deployed to the environment.
   • Find the diff between current and previous GitLab versions using this example https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/security/gitlab/-/compare/start_commit_sha...end_commit_sha to see if there was a change that could have affected the test.
2. Feature Flag: Check if a new feature flag is enabled in the environment.
   • When a feature flag is enabled, it’s being reported to specific QA pipeline Slack channel. This also triggers a Full QA job and it may help to identify which specific feature flag caused the failure.
   • A list of logs containing details on both recent and historic feature flag changes can also be viewed by visiting the feature-flag-log project. Each time a feature flag is updated, a new issue is generated in the project with helpful information such as when the feature flag was changed, who performed the update and on which environment. The project contains several host labels that can help filter by environment when searching through issues (ex: ~host::staging.gitlab.com)
     • You can also reference this dashboard for a visual representation of feature flag statuses.
3. Environment / Infrastructure: If there were no code or feature flag changes and the environment has flaky errors, first start with analyzing Sentry errors and Kibana logs to further investigate the issue.
   • Review the #incident-management channel to check if any ongoing incidents may be contributing to the failures.
   • If validate_canary! check is failing, check if canary is not disabled on the environment by running /chatops run canary --production on #production or /chatops run canary --staging on #staging Slack channels. If canary is enabled, each server should report a few connections UP. There is known intermittent issue with the traffic not getting directed to canary even though the gitlab_canary=true cookie is set.
   • GitLab’s Tamland may also be a helpful resource to review. Tamland is used to help forecast the utilization and saturation of various services, such as Sidekiq. For example, if high saturation is predicted, this could surface as flaky behavior in our tests due to performance degradation from that service. More information about Tamland can be found here.
   • You may also reach out to the Infrastructure team at #infrastructure-lounge and ask if something was changed recently on the environment in question.
4. Test Data: Check that test data is valid. Live environments like Staging and Production rely on pre-existing data (QA users, access tokens).
5. New GitLab QA version: Check if a new GitLab QA version was released.

Failure examples can be seen in Training Videos.

Classify and triage the test failure

The aim of this step is to categorize the failure as either a stale test, a bug in the test, a bug in the application code, or a flaky test.

We use the following labels to capture the cause of the failure.

• ~"failure::investigating": Default label to apply at the start of investigation.
• ~"failure::stale-test": Stale test due to application change
• ~"failure::broken-test": Bug in the test
• ~"failure::flaky-test": Flaky test
• ~"failure::test-environment": Failure due to test environment
• ~"failure::bug": Bug in the application
• ~"failure::external-dependency": Failure due to an external dependency

Bugs blocking end-to-end test execution (due to the resulting quarantined tests) should additionally have severity and priority labels. For guidelines about which to choose, please see the blocked tests section of the issue triage page.

Note: It might take a while for a fix to propagate to all environments. Be aware that a new failure could be related to a recently-merged fix that hasn’t made it to the relevant environment yet. Similarly, if a known failure occurs but the test should pass because a fix has been merged, verify that the fix has been deployed to the relevant environment before attempting to troubleshoot further.

Stale test due to application change

The failure was caused by a change in the application code and the test needs to be updated.

• Include your findings in a note in the issue about the failure.
• Apply the ~"failure::stale-test" label.
• If possible, mention the merge request which caused the test to break, to keep the corresponding engineer informed.

See [Quarantining Tests]

Bug in the test

The failure was caused by a bug in the test code itself, not in the application code.

• Include your findings in a note in the issue about the failure.
• Apply the ~"failure::broken-test" label.

See [Quarantining Tests]

Bug in the application

The failure was caused by a bug in the application code.

• Apply ~"failure::bug" label to the test failure issue(s).
• Create a new issue link all related test failure issue(s) to this issue.
• Include your findings in a note in the bug issue about the failure.
• Add the steps to reproduce the bug and expected/actual behavior.
• Apply the ~"type::bug" label, and cc-ing the corresponding Engineering Managers (EM), QEM, and SET.
• Apply the ~"found by e2e test" label to the bug issue (or bug fix MR if it is fixed immediately) to indicate the bug was found by the end-to-end test execution.
• If the problem adheres to the definition of a transient bug, apply the ~“bug::transient” label as well.
• If there is an issue open already for the bug, use this issue instead and apply the above steps.
• Communicate the issue in the corresponding Slack channels.
• Quarantine the test right after the bug issue has been created. Leave a note on the bug issue with the link to the quarantined test and mention that it should be un-quarantined with the fix.
• When the reason for quarantining a test is because of a low severity bug in the code which will not be fixed in the upcoming couple of releases, add the ~"quarantine" , quarantine with type and ~"failure::bug" labels to the test failure issue(s).
• When the bug is fixed, the related quarantined tests should be unquarantined and verified as well. The bug issue and all related test failure issues should be closed out together.

Note: GitLab maintains a daily deployment cadence so a breaking change in master reaches Canary and Production fast. Please communicate broadly to ensure that the corresponding Product Group is aware of the regression and action is required. If the bug is qualified for dev escalation (example: priority::1/severity::1 issue that blocks the deployment process), consider involving On-call Engineers in the #dev-escalation channel. To find out who’s on-call follow the links in the channel subject line.

To find the appropriate team member to cc, please refer to the Organizational Chart. The Quality Engineering team list and DevOps stage group list might also be helpful.

See [Quarantining Tests]

Flaky Test

The failure is due to flakiness in the test itself.

• Include your findings in a note in the issue about the failure.
• Apply the ~"failure::flaky-test" label.
• Add the test to our Test Reliability: Improve test design tracking issue to identify areas of improvement that can help prevent future flakiness.

Flakiness can be caused by a myriad of problems. Examples of underlying problems that have caused us flakiness include:

• Not waiting appropriately for pages to load or transitions from one state to another to complete.
• Animations preventing tests from interacting with elements.
• Non-independent tests (i.e. test A passes when run first, but fails otherwise).
• Actions not completing successfully (e.g. logging out).

For more details, see the list with example issues in our Testing standards and style guidelines section on Flaky tests.

See [Quarantining Tests]

Failure due to test environment

The failure is due external factors outside the scope of the test but within a test environment under GitLab’s control. This could be due to environments, deployment hang-ups, or upstream dependencies within GitLab’s control.

• Include your findings in a note in the issue about the failure.
• Apply the ~"failure::test-environment" label.
• Identify the general category of improvement and add the failure issue to the approprite Test Reliability issue listed within the Improve test environment reliability and reduce flaky/transient test failures tracking issue.
  • Endeavor to create an appropriate action item (issue or MR) to help resolve the reliability issue as indicated in the tracking issues.

A job may fail due to infrastructure or orchestration issues that are not related to any specific test. In some cases these issues will fail a job before tests are ever executed. Some examples of non-test related failures include:

• Failed to download container from GitLab Container Registry
• Failed to complete orchestration of a Geo cluster
• CI runner timeouts
• 500 error while uploading job artifacts
• Expired tokens (For more information, check out how to Rotate Credentials)

Failure due to external dependency

The failure is due to an external dependency the test is reliant on, but is outside of GitLab’s control. This could be due to outages in external package management systems, or outages in third-party integrations. If possible, external dependencies should be avoided to increase the reliability of the test suite.

• Include your findings in a note in the issue about the failure.
• Apply the ~"failure::external-dependency" label.
• Include a link to the external dependency’s outage notice, if available.

Some examples of external dependency failures could include:

• Outages in package or container management systems such as registry.npmjs.org, RubyGems.org, NuGet or dockerhub
• Outages in third-party integrations such as Zuora

Notify relevant groups about the failure

Failure needs escalation

If the failure is in a smoke test, it will block deployments (except for Staging Ref failures). Please inform the release managers of the root cause and if a fix is in progress by Quality. On GitLab.com, you can use @gitlab-org/release/managers. In Slack, you can use @release-managers.

If the failure could affect the performance of GitLab.com production, or make it unavailable to a specific group of users, you can declare an incident with /incident declare in the #production Slack channel, this will automatically prevent deployments (if the incident is at least an S2).

Notify group in all cases

Please also raise awareness by looping in the appropriate team members from the product group, such as SET or EM. The SET/EM can be identified by looking for who is assigned to that stage/group. Many tests are tagged with a product_group which will help with identification. You may also want to post in Quality’s Slack channel #quality depending on the impact of the failure.

Following up on test failures

Fixing the test

If you’ve found that the test is the cause of the failure (either because the application code was changed or there’s a bug in the test itself), it will need to be fixed. This might be done by another SET or by yourself. However, it should be fixed as soon as possible. In any case, the steps to follow are as follows:

• Create a merge request (MR) with the fix for the test failure.
• Apply the ~“Pick into auto-deploy”, ~“priority::1”, and ~“severity::1” labels if the fix is urgent and required to unblock deployments.

If the test was flaky:

• Confirm that the test is stable by ensuring it passes 3 to 5 times while in quarantine.

Note The number of passes needed to be sure a test is stable is just a suggestion. You can use your judgement to pick a different threshold.

If the test was in quarantine, remove it from quarantine.

Quarantining Tests

The aim of quarantining a test is not to get back a green pipeline, but rather to reduce the noise (due to constantly failing tests, flaky tests, and so on) so that new failures are not missed. If you’re unsure about quarantining a test ask for help in the#quality Slack channel, and then consider adding to the list of examples below to help future pipeline triage DRIs.

Examples of when to quarantine a test:

• Bug in test code (~"failure::broken-test"), and a fix won’t be ready for review within 24 hours
• Stale test (~"failure::stale-test"), and a fix won’t be ready for review within 24 hours

Examples of when not to quarantine a test:

• Test failure is environment-related (~"failure::test-environment"), and neither the application code nor test code are the cause of the failure
• A merge request to fix the failure will be ready for review within 24 hours
• A flaky smoke test.
  • The :smoke tag should be removed from the test to prevent it running with the smoke suite, but still allowed to run elsewhere while the flakiness is under investigation or being worked on to unblock deployment.
  • Create an issue to follow up and restore the :smoke tag as soon as possible. Tests at the :smoke level should be given priority when addressing flakiness within our test suites.
  • Create a # TODO note in the test as a reminder with a link to the previously created issue url. For example:
    • # TODO restore :smoke tag and close https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/######

Note The time limit for the fix is just a suggestion. You can use your judgement to pick a different threshold.

Fast quarantine

If a test is failing and you have good reason to quarantine it quickly you can fast quarantine it. Fast quarantine can be done by a single person, without requiring review by another engineer.

You should use fast quarantine to unblock deployment pipelines and MRs if the failure is disruptive and you’ve ruled out bugs as the cause of the failure (e.g., you’ve identified that the test is stale, or flaky).

Note: Failing blocking job in the e2e: test-on-gdk child pipeline will block MR pipelines as well as scheduled master pipelines. Failures of those tests are good candidates for fast quarantine.

After fast quarantining, please follow the long-term quarantine process below.

Long-term quarantine

• Add the :quarantine metadata to the test with a link to the issue (see quarantined test types)

Note If the example has a before hook, the quarantine metadata should be assigned to the outer context to avoid running the before hook.

• Create a merge request using the Quarantine End to End Test template.
  • The merge request shall have the labels: ~"Quality", ~"QA", ~"type::bug".
  • The merge request may have auto-deploy labels: ~"Pick into auto-deploy", ~"priority::1", and ~"severity::1". Please note that this is reserved for emergency cases only, such as blocked deployments, as it will delay all other deployments by around two hours.
  • The merge request may have stage or group labels. E.g. ~"devops::create" ~"group::source code".
  • The merge request shall have the current milestone.
  • The merge request shall link to (but not close) the failure issue.
• The failure issue should remain open and be assigned a DRI (likely the counterpart SET) for fixing, re-evaluating, or dequarantining the test as needed.

To be sure that the test is quarantined quickly, ask in the #quality Slack channel for someone to review and merge the merge request, rather than assigning it directly.

Here is an example quarantine merge request.

Note Be aware that for blocked release cycle auto deploy with quarantined test will not work. During canary deployment we trigger tests against both staging and canary. Spec is not quarantined on staging yet because quarantined MR didn’t reach it. That leads to environment circular dependency problem.

In that case the Release Managers should decide whether it is possible to rollback Staging, or whether to manually deploy the quarantined MR to Staging. Manually deploying the fix to Staging will reduce the amount of mixed-version testing but may be the only option to allow deployment pipelines to continue.

Quarantined Test Types

If a test is placed under quarantine, it is important to specify why. By specifying a quarantine type we can see quickly the reason for the quarantine.

Below is a list of quarantine types you may use, and their purpose. If the reason for quarantine is not listed below, please consider contributing to this list:

Note: Be sure to attach an issue to the quarantine metadata. We use this issue for tracking the average age of the quarantined tests.

Examples

it 'is flaky', quarantine: { issue: 'https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/12345', type: :flaky }
it 'is due to a bug', quarantine: {
                        issue: 'https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/12345',
                        type: :bug
                      }
context 'when these tests rely on another MR', quarantine: {
                                                 type: :waiting_on,
                                                 issue: 'https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/12345'
                                               }

Nested contexts

You should apply the quarantine tag to the outermost describe/context block that has tags relevant to the test being quarantined.

## Good
RSpec.describe 'Plan', :smoke, quarantine: { issue: 'https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/12345', type: :flaky } do
  describe 'Feature' do
    before(:context) do
      # This before(:context) block will only be executed in smoke quarantine jobs
    end
  end
end

## Bad
RSpec.describe 'Plan', :smoke do
  describe 'Feature', quarantine: { issue: 'https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/12345', type: :flaky } do
    before(:context) do
      # This before(:context) block could be mistakenly executed in quarantine jobs that _don't_ have the smoke tag
    end
  end
end

Dequarantining Tests

Failing to dequarantine tests periodically reduces the effectiveness of the test suite. Hence, the tests should be dequarantined on or before the due-date mentioned in the corresponding issue.

Before dequarantining a test:

• If the test failure was originally discovered in gitlab-org/gitlab nightly schedule pipeline, MR or master pipeline, please make sure that the test passes on your local against GDK with latest code and that it has passed a few times in the nightly pipeline’s quarantine job for that test.
• If the test failure was originally discovered in staging, canary or production pipeline, please make sure that the test passes in the CI pipeline against that environment. You can trigger a CI pipeline against a live environment by clicking “Run Pipeline” button on the staging, canary or production pipelines page and setting the RELEASE variable to the release that has your changes. See Running GitLab-QA pipeline against a specific GitLab release for instruction on finding your release version created and tagged by the Omnibus pipeline.

To dequarantine a test:

• Create a merge request that removes the :quarantine tag using the Quarantine End to End Test MR template.
• Close the issue created as part of the quarantining process.

As with quarantining a test, you can ask in the #quality Slack channel for someone to review and merge the merge request, rather than assigning it.

Re-evaluating tests

If the due date of a failing test issue is reached, you should re-evaluate if the failing test should really be covered at the end-to-end test level, or if it should be covered in a lower level of the testing levels pyramid.

If you decide to delete the test, open a merge request to delete it and close the test failure issue. In the MR description or comment, mention the stable counterpart SET for the test’s stage for their awareness. Then open a new issue to cover the test scenario in a different test level.

If you decide the test is still valuable but don’t want to leave it quarantined, you could replace :quarantine with :skip, which will skip the test entirely (i.e., it won’t run even in jobs for quarantined tests). That can be useful when you know the test will continue to fail for some time (e.g., at least the next milestone or two).

Quarantined test report

Every week, a list of the current long-term quarantined E2E tests in both the GitLab and CustomersDot project is reported to the #quality-reports Slack channel.

This report is generated from the Test Platform Department’s toolbox project.

Training videos

These videos walking through the triage process were recorded and uploaded to the GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel.

• Quality Team: Failure Triage Training - Part 1
  • Covers the basics of investigating pipeline failures locally.
• Quality Team: Failure Triage Training - Part 2
  • Continued discussion with a focus on using Docker containers that were used in the pipeline that failed.
• Quality Engineering On-call Rotation and Debugging QA failures (private video on GitLab Unfiltered)
  • Overview of QE on-call rotation process, GitLab deployment process and how to debug failed E2E specs with examples.
• Quality Engineering: Test environments show and tell
  • A show and tell presentation that gives an overview of our test environments. Originally presented for an audience of our counterparts.
• Runner Taskscaler and Fleeting Test Plan Discussion
  • A high level discussion on the new runner architecture, including the new taskscaler and fleeting, the components replacing docker-machine for runner autoscaling.

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