Phase 2 — Queued PRs and Tiered Gates

Summary

Phase 2 builds on the Phase 1 frontend pipeline (Amplify-branch-sync replaced by GitHub Actions deploys; see the parent Frontend Pipeline page) and addresses the next bottleneck: PR throughput, merge serialization, and post-merge release/deploy automation.

The phase introduces:

GitHub merge queue with tiered check gates (Fast Gate on PR push, Queue Gate in merge_group, Post-Merge automation on main).
PR-body CHANGELOG — entries live in the PR description; an automated workflow assembles them into CHANGELOG.md on merge, computes the SemVer bump, validates with CLQ, and creates a GitHub Release.
Deploy Frontend quality gate — Extended E2E (non-@sanity/non-@acceptance) and quarantine-budget enforcement run inline in the deploy workflow and gate demo/prod deployment.
Non-blocking quarantine job — quarantined tests run post-merge against the deploy commit for flaky-signal aggregation, without gating deploys.
Quarantine system — a @quarantine(YYYY-MM-DD, #issue) test tag, a reusable quarantine-check composite action, a budget config (e2e/quarantine.config.json), and the existing weekly flaky-test aggregation.

Status

Aspect	Value
Status	Completed (with one known follow-up)
Period	2026-04-23 → 2026-04-28
Repos affected	`arda-frontend-app`
Owner	Miguel (`jmpicnic`)
Latest assembly version on `main`	`v0.109.3`

Merged PRs

PR	Title	Merge commit
#803	Deploy quality gate (initial polling implementation), CI/E2E trigger cleanup, reusable quarantine action	`a330707`
#805	Inline Extended E2E into deploy quality gate; remove `post-merge-e2e.yaml`	`8ad4208`
#807	Non-blocking `quality-gate-quarantine` job	`b88a560` precursor / `0e8701a` merge
#808	Authenticate `npm ci` to GitHub Packages in deploy workflow	`b88a560`

Earlier related work (PR-body CHANGELOG, merge-queue adoption, tiered gates, quarantine system bootstrap) landed in PRs preceding #803 and is documented inline in design.md.

Documents

design.md — pipeline architecture, gate semantics, deploy quality gate, quarantine system.
decisions.md — design decisions with rationale (PR-body CHANGELOG, inline-vs-polling gate, non-blocking quarantine, deploy SHA pinning).

Companion process documentation

The phase introduced a new contributor workflow. The how-to for humans is published outside the roadmap:

Frontend PR Process — companion to the pr-steward agent skill.

Known follow-ups

quality-gate-quarantine summary script bug — the bash/jq script that builds the per-test summary table fails on a single-quote inside an inline jq comment. Tracked on arda-frontend-app#795 (the same issue covers TC-NAV-004 hydration; the fix is required for that test to be unquarantined and re-run cleanly).
TC-NAV-004 (#795) — quarantined sidebar toggle test, awaiting React hydration investigation.
PR-steward skill auto-detect refinement — the simple vs queued detection ruleset query may need fallback paths for repositories with non-standard branch protection setups.

Reference: pipeline architecture (final state)

PR push (Fast Gate, ~5 min)
├── lint, build, unit-tests-coverage
├── changelog-check (validates PR body)
├── e2e (pass-through — shards skip, summary auto-passes)
└── quarantine-check

Merge queue (merge_group, ~10–15 min)
├── lint, build, unit-tests-coverage (re-run on rebased code)
├── changelog-check (pass-through)
├── e2e sanity shards (alpha, bravo) + acceptance shards (alpha, bravo, charlie)
└── quarantine-check

Post-merge (push to main)
├── Changelog Assembly → CLQ → GitHub Release
│     └── triggers Deploy Frontend
└── Deploy Frontend
      ├── source-info (traceability)
      ├── deploy-dev → deploy-stage (in series)
      ├── quality-gate-build → quality-gate-{alpha,bravo} → quality-gate-evaluate (parallel with deploys)
      ├── quality-gate-quarantine (non-blocking, parallel)
      ├── stage-annotation (warning if prod blocked)
      └── deploy-demo + deploy-prod (after stage + quality-gate-evaluate; prod requires environment approval)

Nightly (cron)
└── WebKit + Mobile Safari E2E → auto-issue on failure

Weekly (cron)
├── Pipeline metrics → tracking issue comment
└── Flaky-test aggregation → flaky-test issues