CI/CD (Fast Feedback, Safe Delivery)

When to use

• •Creating or updating CI workflows.
• •Reducing pipeline duration or flaky failures.
• •Defining release gating for production deployments.

Steps

1) Define triggers and required checks

• •Trigger CI on pull requests and pushes to main.
• •Mark format/analyze/test workflows as required checks before merge.
• •Keep required checks minimal but sufficient for regression prevention.

2) Keep jobs deterministic and isolated

• •Pin SDK/tool versions in CI.
• •Avoid shared mutable state between jobs.
• •Fail fast on unstable or network-fragile tests; move those to dedicated integration flows.

3) Order jobs for fast feedback

• •Run formatting and static analysis first.
• •Run unit/widget tests next.
• •Run heavier build/signing jobs only after quality checks pass.

4) Optimize execution time

• •Cache pub dependencies and reusable artifacts where CI supports it.
• •Parallelize independent jobs (for example test shards or package groups).
• •Prefer incremental, targeted test/build scopes when the repository supports it.

5) Gate production delivery

• •Keep production deployment behind explicit approval or protected release jobs.
• •Use feature flags or staged rollout for high-risk functionality.

6) Continuously tune pipeline quality

• •Track pipeline duration and flaky test rate.
• •Fix flaky tests before adding new jobs.
• •Revisit required checks when architecture or tooling changes.