## TL;DR
Every flaky test deserves the same five-minute triage: identify it, check its failure history, decide quarantine versus fix, and record the decision. Quarantine first so it stops blocking people, then fix or delete with an owner and a date. A test with no owner and no date is a test that stays flaky forever.

## The query
```text
flaky test triage runbook for on-call: template
```

## Use this when
- A test fails intermittently and pages or blocks the on-call
- Your team argues about whether to quarantine, skip, or fix a test
- You need a repeatable process instead of ad-hoc judgment calls

## Not for
- Making tests deterministic (that is test design work, not triage)
- Speeding up a slow suite (that is performance work)
- Root-causing one specific failure (this template structures the decision, not the debug)

## Steps
1. Identify the test precisely. Record the full test name, file, suite, and the CI job it failed in. Vague names make history lookups useless.
   Expected output: a runbook entry with the exact test identifier and a link to the failing run.
2. Pull the failure history. Check the last 30 days: how often it failed, on which branches, and whether failures cluster by time of day or by machine.
   Expected output: a failure rate and any pattern, for example 12 percent failure, clustered on one CI runner type.
3. Classify the failure mode. Mark it as timing-dependent, order-dependent, environment-dependent, or data-dependent based on the logs.
   Expected output: one checked category with the log line or screenshot that supports it.
4. Quarantine if it is blocking anyone. Move it to a quarantine suite that runs but does not gate merges, and note who is unblocked.
   Expected output: the test runs in quarantine, main is green, and the on-call is no longer paged by it.
5. Assign an owner and a deadline. No owner means no fix. Set a date by which it is fixed, deleted, or re-triaged.
   Expected output: a named owner and a calendar date on the runbook entry.
6. Fix or delete, then unquarantine. After the fix lands and the test is green for a week in quarantine, move it back to the gating suite.
   Expected output: the test back in the main suite with a full week of green quarantine history.

## Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_u2NRVR53V5IT9XJtsPUdmQ