Every SDET I know has a private ritual for the morning after a red nightly, and every one of them is embarrassed by it.
Mine went like this. Open the report. Count the failures. Scan the test names. Then, without opening a single stack trace, decide which ones were "probably real" based on nothing more defensible than a feeling about which parts of the app had been touched that week.
I called it triage. It was pattern matching on vibes, and I did it every working day for years.
The morning that made me stop
Nine failures. Here's what they turned out to be, after I'd spent most of a day finding out.
