Application developers make application changes and configurations that need to be integrated frequently with updates from other developers. These changes need to meet minimum standards of quality and compatibility ensuring that the changes made will not break existing functionality or cause a conflict with other changes. These users can leverage the merge pipeline template, built on the DevOps concept of Continuous Integration (CI).
Merge pipelines enable developers to submit rule branches for a merge after validating
the changes against specific quality gates such as guardrails, branch review, and
automated tests. If all merge criteria are successfully met, the branches merge and you
can trigger a deployment to higher environments using the Trigger
deployment task. If any of the quality gates fail, the merge request is
rejected and the developer will be notified on the failure. 
Merge pipelines are an application pipeline type within Deployment Manager. If you are looking to create a merge pipeline, see Creating a merge pipeline.
If you are new to Deployment Manager, see Installing or upgrading Deployment Manager 5.x to get started.