CI/CD for New Features | Dataford Interview Questions

How do you approach CI/CD pipelines when deploying new features?

Implement a function that orders pipeline stages while respecting their dependencies. Return an empty list when the dependencies contain a cycle.

Input and Output

stages is a list of unique stage names. dependencies contains pairs [before, after], meaning before must run before after. Return a lexicographically smallest valid ordering, or [] if no valid ordering exists.

Constraints

0 <= len(stages) <= 1000
0 <= len(dependencies) <= 5000
Stage names are unique non-empty strings
Every dependency references stages in stages
Each dependency pair contains distinct stage names
No duplicate dependency pair appears

Function Signature

def deployment_order(stages, dependencies):

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