CAD Continuous Integration and Delivery Questions and Answers Flashcards

What is the key difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment?

Answer: Continuous delivery requires manual approval before production release while continuous deployment is fully automated

Continuous delivery ensures code is always in a releasable state with a manual gate before production, while continuous deployment automatically releases every passing change.

Which metric best indicates the health of a team's continuous integration practice?

Answer: The lead time from commit to successful build and test completion

Lead time from commit to build completion measures how quickly feedback is delivered, which is a core indicator of CI effectiveness.

What is the purpose of running integration tests in a staging environment before production deployment?

Answer: To verify that components work together in an environment that closely mirrors production

Integration tests in staging validate that interconnected components behave correctly in a production-like environment before actual release.

How does feature flagging support continuous delivery practices?

Answer: By allowing incomplete features to be merged and deployed without being visible to users

Feature flags decouple deployment from release, allowing teams to merge and deploy incomplete features safely while controlling their visibility.

What is the main risk of having a slow CI pipeline?

Answer: Developers batch larger changes and integrate less frequently, increasing merge conflicts

Slow pipelines discourage frequent commits, leading developers to batch changes which increases the risk of integration conflicts and harder-to-diagnose failures.

In an agile CI/CD context, what is an 'artifact' produced by the build process?

Answer: A deployable package such as a JAR, Docker image, or compiled binary

A build artifact is the deployable output of the CI process, such as a compiled binary or container image, that moves through the pipeline to deployment.