statusdepends

Statusdepends is a formal concept in workflow and automation systems that expresses that the current status of an entity, such as a task, job, artifact, or release, is contingent on the statuses of its dependencies. It provides a declarative way to model gating criteria directly in the workflow definition, rather than relying on procedural checks outside the pipeline.

As a rule, statusdepends defines which dependency states must be achieved before the dependent entity can transition to its next state. Operators such as AND and OR are used to compose conditions (for example, all prerequisites must be "success" or at least one condition met). Evaluations typically occur when a dependency changes, and status propagation updates downstream statuses automatically to reflect the latest information.

Examples of statusdepends usage include continuous integration pipelines, where a deployment job’s statusdepends on the build and test jobs reaching "success" before it can begin. In release management, a production rollout may be gated behind a staging deployment that has achieved all required prerequisites and approvals. These patterns help ensure that complex processes advance only when upstream conditions are satisfied.

Implementation considerations include preventing cycles and deadlocks, supporting timeouts, and handling partial failures gracefully. Statusdepends is commonly used in declarative pipelines and workflow engines to reduce manual orchestration and improve reliability, though it requires careful design of the dependency graph and clear failure handling to avoid unintended stalls.

Statusdepends is related to dependency management and status propagation in modern workflow systems, serving as a mechanism to encode gating logic directly into process definitions.