Modern QA2026Common Pipeline Anti-Patterns — tiles
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7.4Common Pipeline Anti-Patterns

Anti-Pattern Problem Fix
Tests only run on main Bugs discovered after merge, harder to fix Run tests on every PR
No artifact collection Failures require re-running the entire pipeline to debug Always upload reports, screenshots, logs
Hardcoded secrets Credentials in YAML files visible in repo history Use platform secret stores
Monolithic pipeline One job runs everything sequentially for 40 minutes Split into parallel jobs with dependencies
Ignoring flaky tests Tests are allow_failure: true and nobody investigates Quarantine flaky tests, track and fix them
No caching Every run installs dependencies from scratch Cache based on lockfile hash
Bypassable gates "Admin override" used routinely instead of exceptionally Require admin approval for overrides; track bypass frequency
Too many gates Every PR triggers 45 minutes of checks Tier gates by trigger: fast on push, thorough on PR, full on merge