CI/CD Quality Gates That Don't Block the Team

A monorepo runs the full Playwright suite on every PR. Two known flakes sit in checkout. Developers rebase until green. A real refund bug rides through because nobody looks at the 18th red check. The gate trained people to ignore it.

import { test, expect } from "@playwright/test";

test("refund confirmation @critical", async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto("/orders/1/refund");
  await page.getByRole("button", { name: "Confirm refund" }).click();
  await expect(page.getByText("Refund queued")).toBeVisible();
});

jobs:
  gate:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npx playwright install --with-deps chromium
      - name: Critical paths (merge gate)
        run: npx playwright test --grep @critical --reporter=github
      - name: Full suite (informational)
        if: always()
        continue-on-error: true
        run: npx playwright test --grep-invert @critical

• Merge is blocked only by @critical. Everything else can be red without stopping the train — but it still publishes a report.
• Known flakes get a ticket and a quarantine tag, not a silent retry loop. See AI quality engineering services if you need the factory to own that queue.
• Never add a coverage-percentage gate. Coverage can rise while refund is untested.

• Pass: Breaking refund confirmation fails the PR; a flake in settings does not.
• Fail: The gate still runs 400 tests serially and people rebase instead of reading traces.
• Cleanup: Remove coverage-percent required checks from the branch protection rules.