What Is a Test Retry Budget?
A test retry budget is a limit on the number of automatic reruns CI is allowed to use to turn a flaky failure into a pass. Retries help tolerate genuinely nondeterministic tests, but unbounded retries hide real failures and waste compute. A budget forces flakiness to be fixed rather than papered over.
Why it matters
Auto-retrying every failure makes a pipeline green at the cost of trust, since a real bug that fails intermittently looks identical to flakiness. A capped budget keeps retries as a safety valve while surfacing tests that need quarantine or repair. It also bounds the extra runner minutes retries consume.
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