mediumScenarioDesignMidSeniorLead
Your test suite takes fifty minutes and every merge waits for it. How do you fix that?
5 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
Profile before cutting: suite time concentrates in a few tests, and the cause is usually repeated setup or real waiting rather than work. Parallelise what is independent, move the slow and rarely-failing out of the merge path, and treat deleting redundant tests as legitimate.
Was this answer helpful?
Likely follow-ups
- You want to parallelise but tests share a database. What are your options?
- Which tests would you move to a nightly run, and what do you lose?
- How does a flaky test at one failure in fifty affect a fifty-minute pipeline?
- When is deleting a test the right answer?
Related questions
- What is the test pyramid, and is it still the right model for your system?mediumAlso on flakiness and feedback-loops4 min
- Which tests should run on every commit and which should run nightly, and how do you decide?mediumAlso on parallelisation7 min
- Two teams own two services that talk to each other. How do you stop one breaking the other without running both together in a shared environment?mediumAlso on ci4 min
- Your offline ranking metrics improved but engagement dropped in the A/B test. What happened?hardAlso on feedback-loops5 min