TemporalSimon Emms11 min readintermediate
Stop restarting your tests
Summary
This article proposes using Temporal to orchestrate large, flaky end-to-end test suites, treating each test execution as a durable unit of work. This approach allows retrying only failed individual tests or browser configurations, significantly reducing wasted CI time from transient failures.
- Temporal orchestrates individual test executions (e.g., Playwright spec + browser) as independent, durable Activities.
- Failed test executions can be retried individually without re-running successful parts of the suite, saving CI time.
- Temporal acts as an orchestration layer *around* existing test runners, requiring no changes to the tests themselves.
- Workflows use `Promise.allSettled` to fan out and await all test Activities, ensuring progress is made even if some fail.
Engineers managing large, slow, and flaky end-to-end test suites can adopt this pattern to improve CI reliability and reduce feedback cycle times.
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