Continuous Integration and Testing Flashcards

What is a 'feature toggle' (feature flag) and how does it support CI?

Answer: A technique allowing incomplete features to be merged to the mainline and enabled/disabled without deploying new code

Feature toggles decouple deployment from release, enabling trunk-based development even when features aren't ready for all users.

In Agile, who is responsible for writing automated acceptance tests?

Answer: The whole team collaboratively — developers, testers, and product owners

Acceptance test authorship is a shared activity in Agile, ensuring tests reflect business intent and technical correctness.

What does 'zero-downtime deployment' require from a CI/CD pipeline?

Answer: Techniques like blue-green or rolling deployments so users experience no service interruption

Blue-green deployments switch traffic between identical environments, and rolling deployments update instances incrementally, both avoiding downtime.

What is 'code coverage' and what is its limitation as a CI quality gate?

Answer: The percentage of source lines executed by tests; high coverage does not guarantee tests verify correct behavior

Code coverage measures which lines are executed, but tests can achieve 100% coverage while still missing wrong logic or edge cases.

Which practice best supports reliable environment parity between development, CI, and production?

Answer: Containerization (e.g., Docker) to package apps with their dependencies

Containers encapsulate the application and its runtime dependencies, ensuring the same artifact runs identically in all environments.

In a CI pipeline, what is a 'smoke test'?

Answer: A quick, high-level test to verify the build can start and basic functionality works before running deeper tests

Smoke tests act as a sanity check — if the basic application won't even start, there's no point running the full test suite.

What is the primary goal of 'infrastructure as code' (IaC) in relation to CI/CD?

Answer: To version-control and automate infrastructure provisioning so environments are reproducible and testable

IaC applies software engineering practices (version control, code review, automated testing) to infrastructure, enabling consistent and auditable environment creation.