A city permitting portal’s CI/CD pipeline shifts production traffic immediately after deploy, and recent releases shipped latent bugs that residents hit first. Which improvement should the architects prioritize?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Shipping without a smoke check is like opening a new bridge lane before a weight truck rolls across it. Bake a quick automated health pass into the pipeline and only then flip traffic. Residents should not be the first integration test.
Full Explanation
Continuous improvement of deployment quality for existing solutions centers on verification gates before traffic shift. Automated post-deploy smoke tests confirm critical paths on the new version (or in a green environment) before CodeDeploy, weighted target groups, or similar mechanisms move residents. Manual Friday-only changes slow delivery without proving correctness, and removing tests or always using all-at-once deploys increases blast radius. Professional practice keeps automated gates in the pipeline so failures block promotion rather than customer discovery.