Atomic Talk Title: Building Automated Quality Gates into your CI pipelines

How do you know when your code is ready for production? At what point in time can you trust your automated tests enough to eventually deploy into production?

Companies make use of CI pipelines to help drive quicker execution of automated tests and ensure that code is of sufficient quality before deployment. Or at least that is what they are supposed to do. Too often, companies end up using CI pipelines to try and drive better software delivery but end up still delivering poor quality software into test environments and lose trust in the effectiveness of the pipeline process.

In this talk we will have a look at the ideal structure of a CI pipeline and how to build the different quality gates into the pipeline to ensure that things like code coverage, security, automated test results and performance standards are all achieved before code is deployed to the different environments it is required. We will look at the structure of a CI pipeline, what the different stages mean and importantly how to enforce different metrics and targets automatically in the pipeline.

This talk will start off with a talk about CI pipelines itself and the different quality gates that can be included to measure quality across the different stages before going into a more technical look at an actual CI pipeline in YAML code and then working to add the respective quality gates into the code through a variety of exercises.

Talk Takeaways

• Better understand how quality gates can improve your testing.
• Understand how to better utilize quality gates in your CI/CD pipelines.
• Identify criteria that can be measured to build effective quality gates.
• Basic introduction to some code that can be used to implement these automated quality gates.