Rule 6 of 8 · Chapter II — Releases & Environments
Environments gate production; humans approve them.
Why this rule exists
An approval on the prod environment is the difference between "the pipeline deployed at 2am" being a feature or an incident report.
In practice
Define test/staging/prod as ADO Environments. Prod carries an approval check naming real people and a business-hours window unless explicitly overridden.
When it doesn't apply
Fully automated deploys are earned later — after deployment verification and rollback are themselves automated and trusted.