The Problem
You develop your feature, running tests along the way and everything’s working fine. You push right to CI without running the whole test suite (because it takes forever), then FAIL. But all the tests I ran were working! What gives?
You have some tests that only fail when run in a certain order.
The Solution
RSpec Bisect
It’s a utility included with rspec that automates the process of finding the minimum command to reproduce the test failure, so you can debug and fix it without running a ton of slow tests every time.
You use it by adding --bisect to the end of a command you know will produce a failing spec, like:
rspec spec/requests --seed 1234 --bisect
It will give you some weird output like:
Bisect complete! Reduced necessary non-failing examples from 1234 to 0 in 33.98 seconds.
The minimal reproduction command is:
rspec './spec/requests/some_thing_spec.rb[1:1:2]' './spec/requests/
another_bad_spec.rb[1:2:1:1]'
I don’t know what those numbers at the end of the file names are, but RSpec does. This is the command you run to reliably reproduce the unreliable test failure and be on your way finding the problem.
Watch this video about rspec bisect by Thoughtbot to learn more.