Finish the pipeline review

A pipeline is not done when the happy path shows green once. It is done when you trust the failure paths, the rollback path, and who owns each secret.

Treat the review like a production readiness checklist, not a demo for stakeholders.

Run one end-to-end review before you call CI/CD finished.

Map what you built

Collect evidence in one document:

• triggers and branch filters
• job graph and artifact flow
• permissions and environment secrets
• pinned actions and update process
• concurrency groups
• deploy approvals and smoke tests
• artifact retention and cost notes
• on-call owner and runbook links

Another developer should deploy and roll back from that doc alone.

Exercise the critical paths

Run a scripted scenario:

1. fork pull request with tests only, no production secrets
2. failing unit test with uploaded report
3. three rapid pushes to exercise preview cancel
4. staging deploy with broken health check
5. production approval, good release, then rollback to previous artifact
6. revoke one old cloud key after OIDC migration

Note what broke, what was unclear, and what you still accept as risk.

Record honest gaps

“No automatic rollback yet” is fine if it is written down. Hidden gaps are not fine.

Schedule the next review when triggers, runners, or cloud roles change.

Store the review notes in the repo so the next maintainer inherits them. A wiki page nobody links from README does not count.

Try this on your own project: walk through the full scenario in staging this week and fix the first step that required you to explain something verbally.