pipeline

The opener in most DevOps interviews, and the one most people answer as a list of nouns. What earns the follow-up is saying what each stage is allowed to fail for and how long it takes.

Calculate the pipeline critical path, separate runner queues from execution, and improve feedback time without hiding flaky or skipped checks.

Testing is a pipeline design problem in this role, not a QA one. The constraint is the question: you cannot run everything on every commit, so what you choose to defer is the answer.

Four scanners, four different things they see, and one rule that decides whether any of them help: a finding that arrives at the release gate is an argument, and the same finding on a pull request is a ten-minute fix.