All glossary terms
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Quality gate
A checkpoint in a delivery pipeline that work must pass before it proceeds — a set of pass/fail criteria such as test coverage thresholds, no critical vulnerabilities, and all reviews approved, enforced automatically or by a reviewer. A failed quality gate blocks promotion to the next stage rather than logging a warning that gets ignored.
The value of a quality gate is that it's binary and automated: 'coverage must be ≥80%' either passes or it doesn't, with no negotiation under deadline pressure. Gates work best when they encode a small number of genuinely important invariants — too many and teams route around them; too lax and they provide false assurance.