On 30 May 2012, at 17:22, Dan Berindei wrote:

Yet there are still lots of tests that have both group="manual" and
enabled="false", with descriptions like "Disabled until we can
configure Surefire to skip manual tests". You can't blame me for
thinking the comment is still valid :)

Find out who added this and educate them.  :-)

So now I have a counter-suggestion:
1. Add a 'flaky-' prefix to the group name of tests that fail randomly
(or always!) instead of disabling them.
2. Always run tests in parallel, forget about sequential runs as they
take way too long. Many of the changes we'd have to make so that tests
take less time sequentially will make it easier for those tests to
fail when they run in parallel.
3. Configure a separate build in jenkins to run flaky tests as well,
let everyone else run only non-flaky ones.
4. Create a JIRA for fixing flaky tests in general, create separate
JIRAs only where the fix changes production code.
5. Profit!

+1, that's essentially what I have been getting at.