A good workflow should always seek to reduce mistakes and increase code quality. Every built-in safety mechanism in a workflow allows a team to iterate over more complex features more quickly. Simple things, such as preventing pushes directly to production branches and basing production environments on semantically versioned code, allow for rapid development, without any worries about toppling critical infrastructure. 

The following lists a few examples of workflow improvements designed around security and stability:

• Preventing direct code pushes to production on the control repository
• Preventing direct code pushes to masters on individual modules
• Running Puppet parser validation on all manifests prior to a push back to the  repository of origin
• Running code reviews prior to merging into a master or production-like branches of the control repository
• Automated testing