The Ultimate Guide to Creating A CI/CD Pipeline for Pull-Requests

Every automated check transforms uncertainty into measurable reliability.

Every great software team wants to move fast — but without a strong CI/CD pipeline, speed quickly turns into chaos. Bugs slip through. Tests fail silently. Pull requests sit unreviewed for days. The result? Slower delivery and frustrated engineers. A well-architected CI/CD pipeline isn’t just automation — it’s your team’s feedback loop, safety net, and secret weapon for continuous improvement. Let’s explore how to build one that ensures every pull request meets world-class standards before it ever reaches production.

Why?

Let’s begin with the “why.” Why do we need a CI/CD pipeline for a new change request?

With a new change being introduced into the code base, we need to know the following about this change:

• does it still compile when introduced?

• if there is a change to what the user views, is that still functioning as expected?

• are the different logical branches for the change introduced still functioning as expected when executed?

• are there actors that consume the code base, that may be affected with the new change being introduced?

• are there any vulnerabilities exposed from the change being introduced?

• can the change be proved with corresponding tests? e.g. unit, ui, etc.

• is the change focused and of a single scope?

These are some of the many questions a developer can ask themselves when looking to introduce a change into a code base. However, we can surely answer them with a functioning pipeline.

The CI/CD pipeline is the arena to answer the above questions that developers have. On pull-request creation, it should start it’s process to ensure all the questions are answered prior to a developer reviewing code. It is a feedback loop for ensuring quality of the pull-request. Let’s take a look at the stages we can setup as part of the CI/CD pipeline.