flaky-test-retryer

Flaky-test-retryer

Flaky-test-retryer is a tool that automatically detects when presubmit jobs fail due to test flakiness, and reruns them atmost 3 times. Test flakiness and other configuration details are determined by the flaky-test-reporter.

Basic Usage

Flags for this tool are:

• --service-account specifies the path to the file containing a service account for GCS access.
• --github-account specifies the path to the file containing a Github token for Github API calls.
• --dry-run enables dry-run mode.

NOTE: This tool is highly coupled to Prow artifacts, Pub/Sub message formats, and the flaky-test-reporter

If debugging locally, without access to the Knative test projects, you will need to create your own GCP project, Pub/Sub topics, and mock Prow crier. Remember to always run with the --dry-run flag set.

Architecture

The retryer is a K8S service, listening for incoming Pub/Sub messages published by prow on job status changes. The deployment is described in this YAML, and the basic flow of execution is described below.

1. Github PR or /test comment triggers presubmit job.
2. Presubmit job stores artifacts in GCS and publishes Pub/Sub message.
3. flaky-test-retryer receives Pub/Sub message, determines if job can be processed.
4. Compare job's failed test artifacts (if any) with flaky-test-reporter's daily results.
5. If all failed tests are flaky, post a GitHub comment containing /test. If some failed tests are not flaky, list the non-flaky tests preventing retry.
6. Repeat up to 3 times.

Configuration

All configuration options, such as supported repositories, are inferred from the flaky-test-reporter's results. If/when the reporter's updated to support new jobs or repos, the retryer will automatically support it as well.

Pub/Sub

The main thread in the retryer serves as a Pub/Sub listener and handler, waiting for messages to come in on the specified topic. When a message is received, if it fits our retry criteria (job failed, from supported repo, and is a presubmit) a goroutine is created to process it and the message is acked. Otherwise, the message is acked without spawning a new thread.

Log Parsing

When a new thread is created, we parse the failed job's build artifacts from GCS and collect which tests, if any, caused the failure. If the failure was caused due to failed tests (i.e. no build issues), we collect the current flaky tests from the reporter's logs, and cross-reference the failed presubmit tests with the current flaky tests. The result is passed on to the Github commenter.

Github Commenting

The Github comment bot is what keeps track of retries, as well as triggering the retries themselves. The number of previous retries attempted is determined by parsing the comment history of the PR itself, and retries are attempted up to a number set here. There are a number of different comments that can be posted, based on the failed tests and existing retry comments. They all follow a similar format:

The following tests are currently flaky. Running them again to verify...

Test name	Retries
presubmitJobName	x/3

and have different footers, depending on the cross-reference result and the number of attempted retries:

Automatically retrying... /test presubmitJobName

if all tests that failed are currently flaky, triggering a retry.

Failed non-flaky tests preventing automatic retry of pull-knative-serving-integration-tests:

test/that/failed.andIsNotFlaky

if there are tests that failed and are not flaky, listing those that prevent an automatic retry.

Job presubmitJobName expended all 3 retries without success.

if all retries are expended without a success.

Troubleshooting

For troubleshooting questions please ping the oncall. Current oncall can be found here