Here are the top CI/CD interview questions to prepare for your next role. Putting an agent inside the pipeline? AI coding interviews in 2026 covers what interviewers ask about sandboxing, scoped tokens and reproducing a failed agent run. Running a browser suite in that pipeline? How to prepare for a Playwright interview in 2026 covers retries, sharding and why a green run can still be an unhealthy one.
1️⃣ What is the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment?
- A) Delivery is for frontend code; deployment is for backend code
- B) Delivery only builds artifacts; deployment does not build artifacts
- C) Delivery skips testing; deployment requires full test coverage
- D) Delivery requires manual release approval; deployment releases automatically
2️⃣ What does "shift-left testing" mean in the context of CI/CD?
- A) Shifting builds to a separate server
- B) Testing earlier in the development pipeline
- C) Running tests only after deployment
- D) Moving monitoring tools to production
3️⃣ What does "pipeline as code" mean in a CI/CD workflow?
- A) Executing deployment steps without scripts
- B) Defining the pipeline in version-controlled configuration files
- C) Running builds only through a manual approval process
- D) Storing compiled artifacts directly in the source repository
4️⃣ In semantic versioning (X.Y.Z), which number should be incremented when introducing backward-incompatible changes?
- A) Y (minor)
- B) X (major)
- C) None of them
- D) Z (patch)
5️⃣ What do end-to-end (E2E) tests verify in an application?
- A) UI styling changes only
- B) Full user workflows across all system layers
- C) Database schema consistency
- D) Single function behavior in isolation