Confidence: low. Evidence: surprisingly thin as a distinct area. Last substantive change: 2026-07.
This subsystem owns the step from an accepted change to a running one: how software reaches production, and how it comes back if it misbehaves.
The conclusion
Being able to deploy is not permission to deploy. Promotion should be a separate, deterministic capability with signed evidence, staged rollout, health gates, automatic rollback, and an accountable release policy. Deploy, break, fix, and rollback all belong inside the factory boundary, not just up to the merge.
How the thinking got here
For a long time the merged pull request was treated as the finish line. Production systems made it clear that the finish line is further out: a factory that can build but cannot safely release, observe, and roll back is only half a factory. Deployment turns out to be underexamined relative to how much it matters.
Credible alternatives, and when each is right
| Approach | Right when |
|---|---|
| Human release manager | high-stakes or irreversible releases |
| GitOps policy | declarative, auditable delivery |
| Canary or blue-green | catching regressions before full exposure |
| Feature flags and progressive delivery | decoupling deploy from release |
| Immutable releases | reproducibility and clean rollback |
| Autonomous low-risk deploy only | reversible changes with strong health gates |
Where it fails and what we still don't know
Failures include rollbacks that do not actually restore state, schema and database changes that cannot be reversed, and irreversible external effects. Case studies mention deployment, but comparative evidence on autonomous release is limited. Open questions include rollback correctness, database and schema changes, mobile and edge releases, and autonomous change freezes.
What would change our mind
A documented autonomous release path with tested rollback across schema and external effects would move deployment from a human-owned step to a governed factory capability.
Evidence and further reading
No directly supporting research captured yet; the current position is provisional.