Question

A retail company deploys a new checkout service to production several times per week, but the business wants to control exactly when new customer-facing features become visible, run limited A/B experiments, and be able to instantly disable a problematic feature without triggering a redeploy or rollback. The engineering team wants to keep their existing CI/CD pipeline that pushes fully tested code to production continuously. Which technical process change best satisfies both the engineering and business requirements?

Accepted Answer

Introduce feature flags so features can be merged and deployed while staying dark, then toggled on, targeted to segments, or disabled at runtime independent of deployments.

Answer

Switch the pipeline to scheduled monthly release windows so the business can approve every batch of features before deployment to production.

Answer

Adopt a blue-green deployment strategy so the business can approve cutover of the entire environment before any feature is exposed.

Answer

Require every new feature to be developed on a long-lived branch that is only merged and deployed once the business signs off on the release date.