What causes flaky tests in CI?

Tests depend on timing, frame counts, async completion, or shared state, so they pass locally but fail intermittently in CI where timing and ordering differ.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Flaky Tests in a Game CI Pipeline

Quick answer: Remove timing and ordering assumptions, wait on conditions instead of fixed delays, isolate test state, and control randomness so each test is deterministic.

Flaky tests come from nondeterminism — timing, async, shared state. Making tests deterministic fixes them. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Remove timing assumptions

Tests that assume something completes within N frames or milliseconds fail when CI runs slower or faster. Wait on the actual condition (a signal, a state) rather than a fixed delay.

2. Isolate test state

Tests that share global or static state pass or fail depending on order. Reset state between tests, or isolate each, so one test's effects do not leak into another and cause intermittent failures.

3. Control randomness

Seed RNG deterministically in tests so a random value cannot occasionally trigger a failure. A test that depends on uncontrolled randomness is flaky by construction.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Ship the fix, watch the signature disappear from the next build. That's how you know it's really gone.