/ci-cd-quality-gates

name: ci-cd-quality-gates
description: "Design lightweight CI quality gates—lint, test tiers, security scans, and merge policies. Use when setting up or improving pipelines without tying to one stack only."
allowed-tools: Read, Glob, Grep

CI/CD quality gates

Principles

• Fast feedback on every PR; expensive jobs scheduled or nightly
• Fail closed on security and contract breaks
• Same commands locally and in CI

Tiered gates

| Tier | When | Examples | |------|------|----------| | PR required | Every push | Lint, unit tests, typecheck | | PR optional | Large repos | Integration, e2e subset | | Main/nightly | Post-merge | Full e2e, perf budget, dependency audit |

Gate design

1. **Lint/format** — consistent style, catch syntax issues 2. **Unit tests** — required; flaky tests fixed or quarantined 3. **Build** — artifact or package builds for deployable repos 4. **Security** — secret scan, dependency audit (fail on critical) 5. **Contract** — OpenAPI/schema diff when APIs change

Merge policy

• Required checks green before merge
• No force-push to protected default branch without policy
• Document bypass process for emergencies

Anti-patterns

• 30+ minute PR feedback loops
• Different test command in CI vs README
• Ignored flaky tests accumulating

Related

`verify-before-done`, `gstack/ship`, `test-failure-triage`, `api-security-testing`