Intermittent test failures because of timezones

[stephenyeargin]

Now if that subject didn't scare you completely away from this ticket ...

Something in the test runner is allowing a Timezone to be set to Eastern even if the user should be default to Central. This manifests itself in two tests in particular:

• TicketNotifierTest#test_ticket_assigned_to_user [/Users/stephen/Sites/seatshare-rails/test/mailers/ticket_notifier_test.rb:17]:
• TicketNotifierTest#test_ticket_requested_from_user [/Users/stephen/Sites/seatshare-rails/test/mailers/ticket_notifier_test.rb:33]:

The relevant bits:

[...]
<td>Nashville Predators vs. St. Louis Blues : Saturday, October 26, 2013 - 3:00 pm EDT</td>
[...]
to include "<td>Nashville Predators vs. St. Louis Blues : Saturday, October 26, 2013 - 2:00 pm CDT</td>".

To reproduce:

1. Run the test suite
2. Run it again
3. Keep running it until you hit the failure

I'm not sure if it's because Test::Unit is prone to running the tests in an arbitrary order and something is getting reset between tests or what.

[stephenyeargin]

Donated by @rick - https://gist.github.com/rick/e31788fa2d1be67e5910

# Public: provide debugging information for tests which are known to fail intermittently
#
# issue_link - url of GitHub issue documenting this intermittent test failure
# args       - Hash of debugging information (names => values) to output on a failure
# block      - block which intermittently fails
#
# Example
#
#    fails_intermittently('https://github.com/github/github/issues/27807',
#      '@repo' => @repo, 'shas' => shas, 'expected' => expected) do
#      assert_equal expected, shas
#    end
#
# Re-raises any MiniTest::Assertion from a failing test assertion in the block.
#
# Returns the value of the yielded block when no test assertion fails.
def fails_intermittently(issue_link, args = {}, &block)
  raise ArgumentError, "provide a GitHub issue link" unless issue_link
  raise ArgumentError, "a block is required" unless block_given?
  yield
rescue MiniTest::Assertion, StandardError => boom # we have a test failure!
  STDERR.puts "\n\nIntermittent test failure! See: #{issue_link}"

  if args.empty?
    STDERR.puts "No further debugging information available."
  else
    STDERR.puts "Debugging information:\n"
    args.keys.sort.each do |key|
      STDERR.puts "#{key} => #{args[key].inspect}"
    end
  end

  raise boom
end

[stephenyeargin]

Another one:

  1) Failure:
EventTest#test_new_event_has_attributes [/home/runner/seatshare-rails/test/models/event_test.rb:20]:
new event date/time string matches

https://github.com/seatshare/seatshare-rails/blob/master/test/models/event_test.rb#L4-L21 -- again, it's most likely a TimeZone getting set in one test and not being reset to its default status.

[stephenyeargin]

Suggestion is to use an after_tests or setup method to reset the Timezone before each test.