[ryanmarsh]

Funny that you would draw a comparison to a Merkle tree. At one client they had such coupling between systems CI/CD was nearly impossible without either an explosion of test environments or grinding everything to a near halt.

We began working with the idea of consensus based CI/CD. If you pushed a change, you published that to the network. It gave other systems the opportunity to run their full suite of tests against the deployment of your code. Some number of confirmations from dependent systems was required to consider your code "stable". This progressed nearly sequentially assembling something like a block chain.

Ultimately the client was unable to pull this off for the same reason they were unable to decouple the systems: lack of software engineering capability.