We'll try to define a minimum set of steps any continuous deployment pipeline should execute. Do not take them literally. Every company is different, and every project has something special. You will likely have to extend them to suit your particular needs. However, that should not be a problem. Once we get a grip on those, that are mandatory, extending the process should be relatively straightforward, except if you need to interact with tools that do not have a well-defined API nor a good CLI. If that's the case, my recommendation is to drop those tools. They're not worthy of the suffering they often impose.
We can split the pipeline into several stages. We'll need to build the artifacts (after running static tests and analysis). We have to run functional tests because unit testing is not enough. We need to create a release...
