[Arainach]

If your tests only run as part of deploy, you've already lost.

So long as you have a good set of integration tests and the right staging environments to run those tests against, when you ship doesn't matter. I've worked on multiple teams with test suites that give very high confidence what changes are good and are not; most tests were fast and could run before code was merged and block submission. The expensive integration tests ran against a staging environment, and when they started failing it was very quick to identify the range of CLs there and understand what to rollback/fix.

For most of my time there those services only pushed to prod twice a week - sometimes less if the integration tests were failing on the day of one of the deploys. Not every day, not every commit. And yet we had all of those benefits that you claim are impossible. No list of idle people waiting to approve changes, no "huge" deployments, infrastructure for automated tests and more. There are no meetings - those two weekly rollouts are entirely automated infrastructure, and unless an abnormal error rate is detected during the canary proceed entirely without human involvement.

The world didn't fall down. Customers didn't ask us where things were. Oncall appreciated that there weren't constant builds at risk of breaking and falling over - they only had to monitor rollouts twice a week and otherwise could focus on failing tests, logs, and alerts.

[chipdart]

> If your tests only run as part of deploy, you've already lost.

I think you got things in reverse.

Deployments happen at each pipeline run. At each pipeline run, you run tests.

Continuous deployment.