Mitigation

When a flaky or broken test blocks CI, teams face a tough choice: fix it immediately, delete it, or ignore it. Quarantine offers a better option. The test keeps running, but its failures no longer block merges. You maintain full visibility without disruption.

A quarantined test still executes in your CI pipeline and its results are still collected by Mergify. The difference is that failures are ignored for merge decisions.

This means:

• Your CI stays green while you work on a fix

• Historical data is preserved, so you can track whether the test improves or worsens over time

• Other team members can see the test is quarantined and why

Quarantine works on any branch, not just the default branch.

You can manually add or remove specific tests from quarantine through the Mergify dashboard. This is useful when you’ve identified a problematic test through Detection and want to stop it from blocking your team while you investigate.

For technical details on how quarantine integrates with your CI pipeline, see the Quarantine documentation.

Auto-quarantine lets Mergify automatically quarantine tests without manual intervention. By default, only flaky tests are quarantined automatically. You can also enable quarantining of known broken tests through an additional option.

This is useful for teams that want hands-off management of unreliable tests. You can enable or disable auto-quarantine per repository from the Mitigation page in the dashboard.

With unquarantine_when_healthy turned on, Mergify removes a test from quarantine once it is healthy again on the default branch, meaning Detection no longer finds it flaky or broken. A test you have fixed counts toward your CI again without you going back to the dashboard.

The option is off by default. You can set it on a quarantine you create yourself, from the dashboard or the API, and on the auto-quarantine configuration in the dashboard, so the tests Mergify quarantines for you end the same way. Turning it on for auto-quarantine does not change quarantines that already exist.

Health is tracked on the default branch, so that is the only branch this watches. A quarantine you limited to some other branch stays until you remove it, even with the option on: the default branch says nothing about how the test behaves there.

When you identify a high-impact flaky or broken test in Detection, you can quarantine it directly to stop it from blocking merges while you work on a fix.

Periodically check the Mitigation page to review quarantined tests. Look for tests whose health status has improved; these may be ready to be removed from quarantine. Turning on unquarantine_when_healthy does that review for you.

For repositories where broken tests frequently block CI, enable auto-quarantine to let Mergify handle it automatically. This reduces manual overhead and keeps your CI pipeline moving.

Mitigation uses the same CI integration as Detection. To ensure quarantine works correctly, your CI must be configured to check quarantine status. See the Quarantine documentation for technical setup details.