2021-11-11: QA smoke test failure on gstg - npm_project_level_spec.rb

Current Status

The root cause is some flakiness in QA specs for packages.

Usually those specs will try to push a package and pull it from the package registry. The problem is that for some specs (such as NPM), we use a fixed package name.

At the end of the specs, the package is removed and the hosting project is removed too. The problem is that we can have some latency in those operations.

The spec suite will continue its execution with the next spec example and could upload the same package name a second time. Usually, it's fine but some package managers APIs have some restrictions on duplicates.

That's the case of NPM: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/npm_registry/#publishing-packages-with-the-same-name-or-version.

So, depending on the latency of removing the package/project, the next spec can fail or not. That's the definition of a flaky spec.

Timeline

Recent Events (available internally only):

• Deployments
• Feature Flag Changes
• Infrastructure Configurations
• GCP Events (e.g. host failure)

All times UTC.

2021-11-11

• 11:21 - @nolith declares incident in Slack
• 11:24 - A flaky test is identified as the cause - #5908 (comment 730593107)
• 11:57 - @10io disables feature flag

Corrective Actions

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Lessons Learned

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Guidelines

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Resources

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