Describe each stage and what it catches. Mention your rollback strategy — interviewers want to know you plan for failure, not just success.
Strong answers cover: linting, unit tests, integration tests, security scanning, build, deploy to staging, smoke tests, production deploy with a rollback strategy. Best candidates discuss blue-green or canary deployments, feature flags for gradual rollout, and automated rollback triggers. They should mention how they balance pipeline speed with thoroughness.
Tests operational maturity. Developers who only think about writing code but not shipping it lack production awareness. Ask: "What is the longest your pipeline takes and how have you optimised it?"