Merge Freezes Before Deployments

Developers announce merge freezes because the integration process is fragile. Deploying requires coordination in chat.
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  3 minute read  

What you are seeing

A message appears in the team chat: “Please don’t merge to main, I’m about to deploy.” The deployment process requires the main branch to be stable and unchanged for the duration of the deploy. Any merge during that window could invalidate the tested artifact, break the build, or create an inconsistent state between what was tested and what ships.

Other developers queue up their PRs and wait. If the deployment hits a problem, the freeze extends. Sometimes the freeze lasts hours. In the worst cases, the team informally agrees on “deployment windows” where merging is allowed at certain times and deployments happen at others.

The merge freeze is a coordination tax. Every deployment interrupts the entire team’s workflow. Developers learn to time their merges around deploy schedules, adding mental overhead to routine work.

Common causes

Manual Deployments

When deployment is a manual process (running scripts, clicking through UIs, executing a runbook), the person deploying needs the environment to hold still. Any change to main during the deployment window could mean the deployed artifact does not match what was tested. Automated deployments that build, test, and deploy atomically eliminate this window because the pipeline handles the full sequence without requiring a stable pause.

Read more: Manual Deployments

Integration Deferred

When the team does not have a reliable CI process, merging to main is itself risky. If the build breaks after a merge, the deployment is blocked. The team freezes merges not just to protect the deployment but because they lack confidence that any given merge will keep main green. If CI were reliable, merging and deploying could happen concurrently because main would always be deployable.

Read more: Integration Deferred

Missing Deployment Pipeline

When there is no pipeline that takes a specific commit through build, test, and deploy as a single atomic operation, the team must manually coordinate which commit gets deployed. A pipeline pins the deployment to a specific artifact built from a specific commit. Without it, the team must freeze merges to prevent the target from moving while they deploy.

Read more: Missing Deployment Pipeline

How to narrow it down

  1. Is the deployment process automated end-to-end? If a human executes deployment steps, the freeze protects against variance in the manual process. Start with Manual Deployments.
  2. Does the team trust that main is always deployable? If merges to main sometimes break the build, the freeze protects against unreliable integration. Start with Integration Deferred.
  3. Does the pipeline deploy a specific artifact from a specific commit? If there is no pipeline that pins the deployment to an immutable artifact, the team must manually ensure the target does not move. Start with Missing Deployment Pipeline.

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