Aviator

Aviator is an advanced developer collaboration and productivity suite designed to streamline the software development lifecycle, particularly the critical phase of code integration and merging. At its core, Aviator provides a robust automated merge queue system that eliminates the chaos of concurrent development, ensuring that your main branch is always stable, green, and ready for deployment. It is trusted by engineering teams at companies like TestRigor, Secureframe, and Health Catalyst to save countless hours of engineering time and reduce developer frustration.

The platform is built to enforce high standards for your CI/CD workflow. By automating tedious and error-prone tasks such as rebasing, monitoring pull requests (PRs), and resolving merge conflicts, Aviator empowers developers to focus on what they do best: writing code. It acts as an intelligent gatekeeper for your codebase, guaranteeing that every PR is thoroughly tested against the most up-to-date version of the main branch before being merged.

How to use Aviator

Getting started with Aviator is a straightforward process designed for quick integration and immediate impact:

1. Integration: Connect Aviator to your GitHub account (both cloud and self-hosted Enterprise versions are supported). The setup process typically takes only a few minutes.
2. Configuration: Define your merge rules and required checks within a simple configuration file. You can specify which automated tests, linters, and human reviews must pass before a PR is eligible for the queue.
3. Workflow Automation: Once a developer's PR is approved and passes initial checks, they can add it to the Aviator MergeQueue with a simple command or label.
4. Automated Merging: Aviator takes over from here. It sequentially picks up PRs from the queue, automatically rebases them on the latest main branch, runs the full suite of tests one last time to ensure compatibility, and merges the code upon success.
5. Failure Handling: If a PR fails the final validation in the queue, Aviator automatically notifies the author, removes the problematic PR, and continues processing the next one, preventing any broken code from reaching the main branch.

Core Features of Aviator

• Automated MergeQueue: Serializes the merging of PRs to prevent race conditions and semantic conflicts, ensuring the main branch is never broken.
• Automatic Rebasing: Keeps PRs constantly updated with the latest changes from the main branch, saving developers from manual and repetitive rebasing tasks.
• Flaky Test Management: Intelligently identifies and handles flaky tests that fail intermittently, preventing them from blocking the development pipeline unnecessarily. This can include automatic retries or temporary quarantining.
• CI/CD Optimization: Streamlines the entire continuous integration process, leading to faster and more reliable builds and deployments.
• Comprehensive GitHub Integration: Works seamlessly with GitHub Pull Requests, Checks, and supports GitHub Enterprise (Cloud and Self-Hosted).
• On-Premise Deployment: Offers on-premise installation options using Docker or Kubernetes for organizations with strict security and compliance requirements.

Use Cases for Aviator

Aviator is ideal for engineering teams of all sizes looking to improve their development velocity and code quality:

• High-Growth Startups: Helps maintain a stable and fast-moving codebase as the engineering team scales rapidly.
• Large Enterprise Teams: Manages the complexity of having hundreds of developers committing code to the same repositories, preventing merge conflicts and integration hell.
• Quality-Focused Organizations: Enforces strict quality gates and testing protocols, ensuring that every piece of code merged is reliable and deployable.
• Teams with Long Test Suites: Automates the 'wait-test-merge' cycle, freeing developers from monitoring long-running CI jobs.

Advantages of Aviator

Adopting Aviator provides significant benefits:

• Increased Developer Productivity: Developers can 'set and forget' their PRs, saving hours each week previously spent on manual merging, rebasing, and monitoring.
• Enhanced Code Stability: Guarantees a perpetually green and deployable main branch, eliminating the stress and downtime caused by broken builds.
• Faster Development Cycles: By automating the final stage of the development workflow, teams can merge and ship features more quickly and confidently.
• Improved Developer Experience: Reduces frustration associated with merge processes and CI failures, leading to a happier and more focused engineering team.

Pricing and Plans

Aviator offers a flexible pricing model designed to scale with your team. It includes a 14-day free trial that does not require a credit card. The pricing is based on the number of 'active collaborators'—defined as users who have created a Pull Request that utilizes Aviator within a billing period. There is no charge for the number of users who only need access to the dashboard. Several plans are available, and you can upgrade or change your plan at any time. For organizations with specific security needs, an On-Premise license is available upon request, supporting self-hosted environments.