CI failure triage

One test is red. Before anyone opens a ticket, reruns the job, or edits a line, someone has to answer a prior question: what kind of failure is this? This is the method for answering it, and for writing the answer down in a form a second person can check.

The cost of getting it wrong is measurable. Google reports that about 84% of the pass-to-fail transitions its CI observes involve a flaky test, and that almost 16% of its tests show some level of flakiness (Google 2016). A triage step that treats every red as a defect files mostly noise; one that treats every red as a flake ships regressions.

What this owns, and what it does not

This owns classification: turning one failed run into one verdict, with the rejected alternatives recorded.

It deliberately does not own: