The Number One Rule of Minimum CD Dot Org

The number one rule is once the developer hits merge, that software cannot be touched by human until it's deployed somewhere. Could be a test server, could be production. If it makes sense for your business application, production is fine. But you know, from from merge until ready for deployment, there must be zero human interaction. The thing where what I'm describing isn't CD yet is I'm not even talking about continuous integration yet or necessarily trunk based development.