CI/CD Pipeline Walkthrough | Dataford Interview Questions

Walk me through a CI/CD pipeline you built from scratch. What were the stages?

For this coding exercise, model the stages as a dependency graph and return the lexicographically smallest valid execution order. Return an empty list when dependencies contain a cycle.

Input: stages, a list of unique integers, and dependencies, pairs [prerequisite, stage]. Output: a list containing every stage exactly once, or [] if no valid order exists.

Constraints

1 <= stages.length <= 10^4
Stage IDs are unique integers
0 <= dependencies.length <= 5 * 10^4
Every dependency references two stages in stages
No duplicate dependency pairs exist

Function Signature

def order_pipeline(stages, dependencies):

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