Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD)

In modern system development, the complexities and rate of change can pose a wilting set of problems to the engineering manager. It is essential that the end-to-end DevOps pipeline (or, the CI/CD system processes supporting the SDLC) implement waves of software regression testing for new check-ins. Additionally, data contract assertions are needed to ensure that new software does not negatively impact the existing state of system data. The assertion outputs are observable outputs of the system that themselves map to success or failure states. Some types of data contracts can only be enforced after a period of time, a data arrival initiated trigger event, a calendar schedule, a data sensitivity threshold, or a measure/metric trigger has been reached.

A key point here is that the assertions and the checking of those assertion outcomes form gates to be unlocked in the CI/CD pipeline. Passing these gates allows forward progress in...