Quality Gate
A quality gate is a defined checkpoint in a development or deployment pipeline that a change must pass before proceeding — a minimum test pass rate, a code coverage threshold, zero critical vulnerabilities — automatically blocking progress if the criteria aren't met, rather than relying on someone remembering to check manually.
Quality gates turn standards that would otherwise be aspirational guidelines ("we should have good test coverage") into enforced, automated requirements — a pull request literally cannot merge if the gate's conditions aren't satisfied, removing the ability for the standard to be quietly skipped under deadline pressure.
Common gate conditions: all tests passing, code coverage above a defined threshold, no critical security vulnerabilities found by SAST or dependency scanning, and no unresolved code review comments — configured to fail the build automatically rather than merely warning and hoping someone notices.
