7.6Hands-On Exercise

1. List all the quality gates currently in your pipeline. Are any missing from the common gates above?
2. Check your branch protection rules. Are all critical checks marked as required?
3. Intentionally try to merge a PR with a failing required check. Verify it is blocked.
4. Add a coverage gate that requires new code to be at least 80% covered
5. Add a security scan and configure it to fail on high-severity findings
6. Set up failure notifications to your team's Slack channel

Interview Talking Point: "I treat the CI/CD pipeline as part of the test infrastructure, not just a deployment tool. I structure pipelines with unit tests as a fast gate on every push, integration tests on PRs, and full browser suites before deploy -- each stage providing progressively deeper confidence. I optimize with dependency caching, test sharding across parallel runners, and selective execution based on changed paths. When a pipeline takes more than 15 minutes for the PR feedback loop, I treat that as a bug to fix. I configure quality gates as required checks on branch protection rules -- all tests pass, coverage does not decrease on new code, no critical security vulnerabilities -- so the pipeline is a reliable safety net, not just decoration."