In my experience, there is always an implicit version, regardless of whether the version is explicit (i.e. user-facing) or not Our GitLab setup has the pipelin

In my experience, there is always an implicit version, regardless of whether the version is explicit (i.e. user-facing) or not Our GitLab setup has the pipeline ID (which is monotonically increasing and disambiguated by gitlab itself) as "the version," which for all intents and purposes is only the docker image tag of the underlying build but is, without a doubt, "the version" of that review environment from the UI's perspective So, hypothetically, if one wanted to file a bug report against a review environment there is unquestionably a "version" number to populate into the ticket. It could be the git sha of "the deployment," or it could be the version of the UI against which the bug was filed, depending on how widely the organization views "this combination of software should work but does not" ownership I recognize this word-soup isn't a tl;dr answer to your question, but since this is an Ask HN this is my Answer HN, and I'll draw the reader's attention to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law for the ultimate ground truth of any such answer