Investigate & Fix/Quarantine test file: /browser_ui/5_package/package_registry/helm_registry_spec.rb

Context

The /browser_ui/5_package/package_registry/helm_registry_spec.rb spec file currently holds the 19th place of test file causing the most CI/CD pipeline failures in the last 3 months 🏅 . During those last 3 months:

  1. It caused 214 MR pipeline failures (that's ~18 pipeline failures a week, each impacting our Engineers)
  2. It caused 10 master pipeline failures (each potentially causing master-broken incidents)

See the Snowflake dashboard for that test file:

Screenshot_2025-06-19_at_14.17.13 Screenshot_2025-06-19_at_14.17.24

More info from the dashboard

  1. Looking at the failures over time, we had one peak on 2024-05-28, but it still fails pipelines daily:

Screenshot_2025-06-19_at_14.17.52

  1. There are 3 tests failing in that file (based on the name, and the number of errors, they are likely to be related)
    • Package Helm Registry using ci job token pushes and pulls a helm chart
    • Package Helm Registry using project deploy token pushes and pulls a helm chart
    • Package Helm Registry using personal access token pushes and pulls a helm chart

They also look suspiciously similar to the tests in gitlab-org/quality/analytics/team#175 (moved). I would bet it's shared logic.

  1. Looking at the recent reports, here are the failures breakdown of the last 58 recent errors:
Error Type Count % of Total Description
RSpec Multiple Exception 30 58.8% RSpec::Core::MultipleExceptionError
Pipeline Creation Timeout 9 17.6% Wait for pipeline to be created failed after 240 seconds
User Avatar Element Not Found 6 11.8% Unable to find css "[data-testid=\"user-avatar-content\"]"
Symbol Conversion Error 2 3.9% no implicit conversion of Symbol into Integer
Capybara CSS Selector Error 4 7.8% Unable to find user avatar content in navigation

Goal

Investigate the problem ,and fix/quarantine (if appropriate).

Even if the problem was caused by an infrastructure issue, I would find it interesting to make that test more resilient to those problems (if applicable).

About the data

We started importing data in Snowflake for non-E2E tests on 2025-04-23. We don't have non-E2E tests data before that date.

Edited by David Dieulivol