Trunk vs Xray
Trunk’s Flaky Tests is a comprehensive platform designed to detect, analyze, and manage flaky tests within your CI/CD pipeline.
Tired of clicking re-run? They were too.
Features
Notifications (GitHub, Slack, Email, etc.)
Test Framework and CI Provider Agnostic
Test Quarantining
Auto Detection
Comprehensive Dashboard
Integrated Ticketing
Detailed Failure Analysis
"Trunk's Flaky Test solution is so far the best one we've worked with, and we look forward to continuing to work with it."
"I primarily focused on the flaky tests tab and found all the information I sought. The app provided an excellent summary of our E2E pain points."
Security Overview
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FAQs
How does Trunk Flaky Tests compare to Xray for flaky test management?
Trunk Flaky Tests and Xray approach flaky test management from different angles. While Xray is primarily a test management tool within the Jira ecosystem, Trunk Flaky Tests specializes in detecting, analyzing, and quarantining flaky tests automatically. Trunk's dedicated focus offers deeper insights into test flakiness patterns and provides automatic quarantining to prevent CI pipeline disruptions. Xray, though comprehensive for general test management, lacks specialized flaky test detection capabilities. For teams struggling specifically with test flakiness in CI/CD pipelines, Trunk Flaky Tests provides more targeted solutions, while Xray might be preferable for teams needing broader test management within Jira.
Can Xray detect flaky tests automatically?
Xray doesn't offer automatic flaky test detection as a built-in feature. While you can manually flag tests as flaky in Xray, it lacks the intelligent auto-detection capabilities found in specialized tools. Trunk Flaky Tests, on the other hand, uses advanced flaky tests detection algorithms to automatically identify inconsistent test behavior across multiple runs. This means with Trunk, you don't have to manually hunt down which tests are flaky—the system identifies patterns and flags problematic tests for you, saving significant engineering time and preventing CI pipeline disruptions. If your team is struggling with unpredictable test failures, a dedicated solution may provide more value than attempting to retrofit Xray for flaky test management.
What strategies does Xray offer to manage flaky tests?
Xray's approach to flaky test management is fairly basic, relying mostly on manual identification and standard Jira issue tracking. You can label tests as flaky in Xray and create tickets for investigation, but there's no automated system specifically designed for flaky test patterns. In contrast, Trunk Flaky Tests offers comprehensive test quarantining strategies that automatically isolate problematic tests to prevent them from disrupting your CI pipeline. Trunk can quarantine tests based on customizable thresholds and failure patterns, while still running them in the background to monitor improvements. This automated approach keeps development velocity high while maintaining visibility on test health—functionality that simply isn't available in Xray's more generalized test management system.
Are there reporting functionalities in Xray for tracking flaky tests?
Xray offers general test reporting capabilities, but lacks specialized analytics for flaky test patterns. While you can create custom Jira dashboards to track manually labeled flaky tests, these reports won't provide the depth of insight needed to understand flakiness trends across your test suite. Trunk Flaky Tests, however, provides dedicated dashboards showing flaky test frequency, impact on build times, and historical patterns. These insights help teams prioritize which flaky tests to fix first based on their actual impact. Trunk also tracks improvements over time, making it easier to demonstrate the ROI of fixing flaky tests—something that's difficult to quantify with Xray's more general reporting tools.
How do Trunk Flaky Tests and Xray integrate with development workflows?
Both tools offer integration capabilities, but they serve different purposes in the development workflow. Xray integrates deeply with Jira for test case management, execution tracking, and requirements traceability. Trunk Flaky Tests, meanwhile, focuses on seamless CI/CD integration with features like GitHub pull request comments that provide immediate feedback on test flakiness directly in PRs. Trunk also offers Jira integration features for teams using both tools, automatically creating and updating tickets for flaky tests. Additionally, Trunk provides Slack integration webhooks for real-time notifications, ensuring your team stays informed without constantly checking dashboards.
Which tool is better for CI/CD pipeline integration?
For CI/CD pipeline integration specifically focused on test reliability, Trunk Flaky Tests offers more specialized capabilities. It's designed to work with various CI providers and testing frameworks, automatically detecting and quarantining flaky tests to prevent pipeline disruptions. Trunk can be integrated directly into your CI workflow with minimal configuration changes, providing immediate visibility into test health. Xray, while capable of showing test results from CI runs, doesn't actively manage the impact of flaky tests on your pipeline. If maintaining green CI builds and preventing false failures is a priority for your team, Trunk's dedicated approach to flaky test management provides more value in this specific area than Xray's broader test management features.
Can Xray's workflows be optimized for flaky test management?
While you can customize Xray workflows for flaky test tracking, it requires significant manual configuration and doesn't address the core technical challenges of detecting and managing flaky tests. You might create custom fields, labels, and Jira workflows to track flaky tests, but you'll still lack automated detection and quarantining capabilities. Trunk Flaky Tests, being purpose-built for this challenge, provides an optimized workflow out of the box with features like automatic detection, quarantining, and tracking. For teams spending significant time managing flaky tests, Trunk offers a more streamlined approach that requires less manual overhead than adapting Xray workflows for a purpose it wasn't specifically designed to address.
How do Trunk Flaky Tests and Xray handle test case management?
These tools approach test case management differently. Xray is fundamentally a test case management solution within Jira, allowing teams to create, organize, and track test cases alongside other project assets. It excels at requirements traceability and structured test organization. Trunk Flaky Tests, while not a complete test case management solution, focuses specifically on identifying and managing problematic tests in your existing framework. Trunk works with your current test organization rather than replacing it, making it complementary to other test management tools. For comprehensive test case management plus specialized flaky test handling, some teams find value in using both tools together—Xray for organization and Trunk for ensuring test reliability.
What best practices does Xray recommend for handling flaky tests?
Xray doesn't provide specific best practices for flaky test management since it's not their core focus. They generally recommend standard approaches like manual identification, labeling flaky tests, and creating tickets for investigation. In contrast, Trunk has developed comprehensive best practices based on experience with thousands of codebases. These include automatic detection to find flaky tests you didn't know about, strategic quarantining to maintain pipeline health, root cause analysis tools, and integration with developer workflows. Trunk's approach emphasizes minimizing the impact of flaky tests while working to fix them, rather than just documenting their existence. For teams struggling with flaky tests, following specialized best practices from a dedicated tool typically yields better results than generic test management advice.
How do users integrate Trunk Flaky Tests with GitHub Issues?
Integrating Trunk Flaky Tests with GitHub Issues is straightforward using Trunk's GitHub Issues integration. This connection automatically creates issues when new flaky tests are detected, assigns them to appropriate team members, and updates them when tests are fixed. The integration adds relevant context like failure logs and occurrence patterns directly to the issues, making troubleshooting more efficient. This automation eliminates the manual step of creating tickets for flaky tests, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. For teams using GitHub as their primary project management tool, this deep integration makes Trunk particularly valuable compared to Jira-centric tools like Xray, which would require custom webhooks or manual processes to achieve similar GitHub Issues integration.
Can Trunk Flaky Tests and Xray be used together?
Yes, Trunk Flaky Tests and Xray can complement each other effectively for teams using Jira. Trunk provides specialized flaky test detection and management, while Xray handles broader test case organization and execution tracking. Through Trunk's Jira integration features, flaky tests detected by Trunk can automatically create or update issues in Jira, which then appear in your Xray test management view. This allows teams to maintain comprehensive test documentation in Xray while benefiting from Trunk's specialized capabilities for flaky test management. The combination provides both the structured test organization that Xray excels at and the automated flaky test handling that Trunk specializes in—giving teams the best of both worlds rather than forcing an either/or decision.
How does Trunk Flaky Tests handle test results from different CI providers?
Trunk Flaky Tests is designed to be CI provider agnostic, supporting major platforms like GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins, and others. The flaky tests uploader tool can ingest test results from virtually any CI system, allowing you to centralize flakiness data regardless of which CI tools different teams might be using. This flexibility is particularly valuable for organizations with heterogeneous CI environments or those going through migrations between providers. Xray, being more Jira-centric, typically requires specific integrations for each CI system and more configuration to aggregate results across different platforms. Trunk's unified approach gives engineering leaders a comprehensive view of test health across the entire organization, even when using multiple CI providers.
Which tool offers better insights into test failure patterns?
When it comes to analyzing test failure patterns, Trunk Flaky Tests provides significantly deeper insights specific to flakiness. Its specialized analytics identify subtle patterns across test runs, distinguishing between consistently failing tests (which indicate actual code issues) and flaky tests with inconsistent results. Trunk tracks factors like environmental conditions, timing patterns, and dependency relationships that might contribute to flakiness. While Xray offers basic test reporting, it lacks these specialized analytics for identifying the complex patterns that often characterize flaky tests. For teams trying to understand why tests are flaky rather than just which ones are flaky, Trunk's purpose-built analytics provide much more actionable intelligence, helping developers address root causes rather than just symptoms.
