FREE CAD Continuous Integration and Delivery Questions and Answers Flashcards

Why is trunk-based development recommended as a complementary practice to Continuous Integration?

Answer: It reduces long-lived branches and merge conflicts, enabling faster integration cycles

Trunk-based development keeps branches short-lived, which minimizes merge conflicts and supports the frequent integration that CI demands.

In a CI/CD pipeline, what is the purpose of a smoke test executed immediately after deployment?

Answer: To quickly verify that critical application paths are functional in the new environment

Smoke tests are lightweight checks run right after deployment to confirm the application's core functionality is working.

Which infrastructure approach allows CI/CD pipelines to create identical, disposable environments for each build?

Answer: Infrastructure as Code with containerization

Infrastructure as Code combined with containers lets pipelines spin up consistent, isolated environments that are destroyed after use.

What is the primary risk of having a CI pipeline with a test suite that takes over 60 minutes to complete?

Answer: Developers avoid integrating frequently, defeating the purpose of CI

Slow test suites discourage frequent commits and delay feedback, which undermines the core benefit of Continuous Integration.

What role does feature flagging play in a Continuous Delivery workflow?

Answer: It allows incomplete features to be merged and deployed without exposing them to end users

Feature flags decouple deployment from release, letting teams merge and deploy code continuously while controlling feature visibility.

Which practice helps maintain database schema compatibility in a Continuous Deployment environment?

Answer: Using backward-compatible, incremental database migrations

Backward-compatible incremental migrations ensure that both old and new application versions can work with the database during rolling deployments.