What is essential to ensure before promoting user stories in a pipeline?

Validating all quality gates is essential before promoting user stories in a pipeline because this step ensures that the user stories meet predefined quality standards. Quality gates serve as checkpoints that check the criteria such as code quality, testing coverage, and compliance with best practices. By validating these quality gates, teams can significantly reduce the risk of deploying low-quality code, minimize bugs in production, and maintain a higher standard of delivery. Furthermore, this process integrates automated testing and manual reviews, ensuring that the user stories are reliable and align with the organization’s overall goal of delivering high-quality software.

Other important practices, such as completing assigned tasks or confirming user story relevance, while beneficial, do not specifically ensure the quality and readiness of the code for production. Conducting stakeholder reviews also adds value but focuses more on acceptance and alignment rather than quality assurance, which is the primary function of validating quality gates. Ultimately, the validation step is critical to achieving both technical excellence and stakeholder satisfaction in the software delivery process.