Question

A financial services company has grown from 5 to 40 developers committing to a shared repository. Recently, several production incidents were traced to code merged directly to the main branch without review, and to merges that bypassed the automated test suite. The engineering leadership wants a repeatable technical process that enforces peer review and prevents untested code from reaching main, while minimizing custom tooling. What should the architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Configure branch protection rules on the main branch requiring at least one approving pull request review and passing CI status checks before merges are permitted.

Answer

Add a nightly Cloud Scheduler job that scans the main branch for commits lacking review metadata and emails the offending developers a warning.

Answer

Grant only senior engineers write access to main and require all other developers to submit patches by email for manual application.

Answer

Move each developer to a separate repository and have a release manager manually cherry-pick approved commits into a central repository weekly.