Flaky Tests & Reliability
Test quarantine
Also known as: quarantine, quarantined tests
Test quarantine is the practice of moving known-flaky tests out of the blocking path of a build so they stop failing the pipeline while their result is still recorded for triage.
Quarantine is a release-velocity decision, not a fix. When a test is provably flaky, letting it block deploys does more harm than good — so you isolate it: it still runs and reports, but its result no longer gates the pipeline. This keeps the build trustworthy for everyone else.
Quarantine is dangerous without discipline. A quarantined test is invisible coverage — a real bug it would have caught now ships silently. Treat quarantine as temporary: set an SLA (for example, fix or delete within two weeks) and track how long tests sit in quarantine so the bucket does not grow unbounded.
- Unblocks releases without deleting coverage outright.
- Quarantined tests still run and report — they just don’t gate the build.
- Needs an SLA and tracking, or it becomes a graveyard of ignored bugs.
Related terms
See it in your own test results
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Last reviewed June 11, 2026