As you may already be aware, the promotion process defines the key set of activities and gates that any system modification will need to go through. It typically encompasses the development, packaging, testing (for example, unit-testing, functional verification, and integration testing), versioning, and deployment. Usually, an organization will have a standardized approach that will be documented in order to describe what is expected of the project and its support teams. In the case of a Hyperledger Fabric network, there will be at least two different promotion processes for the following:

• Smart contracts: As these components are at the vital to business interaction between the participants of the systems, it is imperative that every participant agrees to the content of the contract
• Integration layer: As they sit on the boundary of the network, their promotion process will depend on who owns them (a consortium versus a specific organization)

Optionally, there might also be a process to control changes to the policies of the network; however, it will be closely aligned with the smart contract promotion process.

However, before jumping straight into the configuration of the pipeline, let's spend a bit of time to understand the considerations of these two promotion processes.