Hand off CI ownership with a safe degraded mode
When the cache or check provider is unavailable, maintainers do not know which failures can fall back and which must block merging.
- Focused work estimate
- 2h 30m + prerequisites
- Priority in the scenario
- Medium
- Engineering practice
- Runbooks · Degraded operation · Ownership handoff
Estimated field mix
- DevOps70%
- Site reliability30%
Field percentages are editorial estimates of the ticket's engineering focus. They total 100%; they are not measured time, proficiency scores, or ownership evidence.
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Project context
A fictional TypeScript monorepo has twelve packages and a local CI simulator. Pull requests wait for redundant work, stale caches occasionally pass broken changes, and superseded runs continue consuming executors. Create synthetic package graphs and fake check APIs; no hosted CI credentials or production repositories are supplied.
Setup prerequisites
- Dependency graphs
- Process exit codes
- Test isolation
Preceding work
Complete these dependencies, or supply their agreed outputs before taking this ticket.
- DCI-101 · Pin the required-check contract before optimizing the pipeline
- DCI-106 · Quarantine a flaky test without making it optional forever
- DCI-103 · Compute affected packages from both dependency directions
- DCI-107 · Prevent untrusted pull requests from receiving release secrets
- DCI-104 · Key build caches from every semantic input
- DCI-102 · Fail the pipeline when a command exits through a hidden pipe
- DCI-105 · Cancel superseded pull-request runs without erasing evidence
- DCI-108 · Measure queue and execution delay separately
- DCI-109 · Resume reporting after the checks API loses a response
Acceptance criteria
- Runbook names owners, dependencies, alerts, and escalation conditions
- Cache outage falls back to uncached required checks
- Check-reporting uncertainty blocks eligibility while preserving local results
Implementation constraints
- Do not claim merge protection changes; the exercise documents the intended integration contract.
Verification to include
- Rehearse cache loss and complete an uncached run.
- Lose final check acknowledgement and follow the block-and-reconcile path.
Deliverables
- CI runbook and two recovery rehearsals
Rollout and recovery
Review the runbook with a second engineer before adopting the workflow.
Value of the work
For the engineer: Practice treating CI as a versioned delivery system with correctness, latency, and recovery constraints.
For the team: Review a pipeline that reduces wasted compute without allowing stale or skipped checks to approve changes.
Evidence boundaries
Outcome Evidence: Tests, patches, and runbooks are requested deliverables. They become Outcome Evidence only through a qualified Mission and immutable Evidence IDs.
Ownership Evidence: Independent adaptation must be observed under a declared verification policy and cite immutable Evidence IDs. Completing a planning ticket establishes no Ownership Evidence.