Cypress Catches Up with Auto-Retry, but in a wrong way

Today (2020–08–21), I read an article on Medium: Flaky Tests: Retrying Failed Tests with Cypress. According to the author: ‘ this was one of the top “must-have” features I’ve been waiting for’. A must-have feature, I totally agree. However, why is it only available now in v5? Did the article's author suggest that Cypress testers had been more or less faking test automation all these years?!

Despite what they claimed, not one Cypress tester I have met could answer it when I asked for a history of test executions of 3 months. The teams performed functional testing most manually, resulting in buggy software and slow releases. There might be a good cypress test engineer somewhere who can create, and more importantly, maintain large user-story level UI tests (e.g. 200 test cases, Level 3 of AgileWay Continuous Testing Grading); In addition, the team needs to really trust the automation suite so that they can push the releases to the production, twice a day. However, I haven’t yet met one that can show reliable daily test executions of 50 cypress tests. Therefore, I remain sceptical.

For people who have known me or read my “Practical Continuous Testing” book, they would know that Auto-Retry has been a BuildWise feature from its first release ( internal: 2013, public: 2017, and won a major international award the next year). The idea of auto-retry came to me in 2007, the time when we solved test scripting maintenance with good test design practices (see my book: Practical Web Test Automation) and…