I've had a weird event of having rake test and rake test:functionals producing different results on a Rails 3 app that uses fixtures to insert test database records. The first group was failing on one of the controller tests, while the other one was successfully passing.
I also tried to run the failing test with ruby -I test path/to/file and zeus test path/to/file, but those runs were successful. The issue was reproduced on different machines. The test was failing because of the state of the test database, which seemed impossible to me when I looked at the fixtures.
Strangely enough, the issue disappeared the next day and I no longer can reproduce it. What could be the cause of such a problem and how to avoid it?
