---
title: Detection
description: Identify and prioritize unhealthy tests across your repositories.
---

Even with prevention in place, tests can degrade over time. Detection surfaces
all unhealthy tests (flaky and broken) across your repositories, so you can
see the full picture and prioritize what to fix.

## How tests are classified

Mergify classifies tests based on their results across multiple CI runs,
with recent results weighted more heavily:

- **Flaky**: The test produces inconsistent results on the same commit. It
  passes on some runs and fails on others, without any code changes.

- **Broken**: The test fails consistently. Recent runs are weighted more
  heavily, so a test that started failing recently will be classified as
  broken even if it passed in earlier runs.

Only unhealthy tests (flaky or broken) appear in Detection. Healthy tests
are not listed.

## Understanding confidence

Confidence indicates how much data is available to assess a test's health.

- **High confidence**: Enough runs have been collected to make a reliable
  assessment. The health status is unlikely to change significantly.

- **Low confidence**: Limited data is available. The health status could
  still shift as more runs are collected. Treat low-confidence results as
  preliminary.

Confidence increases as more CI runs are collected for a given test.

## Prioritizing with impact

The impact metric reflects how many failed executions a test causes. A
high-impact flaky test wastes more CI time and disrupts more workflows than
a low-impact one.

Use impact to decide which tests to fix first: high-impact tests give you
the most return on investment when fixed.

## Practical workflows

### Finding your worst tests

Sort by impact to surface the tests causing the most CI disruption. These
are the best candidates for immediate attention.

### Narrowing scope

Use filters to focus on specific areas:

- **Test name**: Search for a specific test or pattern
- **Job name**: Focus on tests within a particular CI job
- **Pipeline name**: Narrow to a specific CI pipeline

### Checking quarantine status

Tests that have already been quarantined are indicated in the health status.
This helps you avoid spending time investigating tests that are already being
managed through [Mitigation](/test-insights/mitigation).

## Setup

Detection requires test metrics collection through repeated CI runs. See the
CI setup guides for your platform:

- [GitHub Actions setup](/ci-insights/setup/github-actions)
- [Jenkins setup](/ci-insights/setup/jenkins)