5 Minutes Top, Your CI Shouldn’t Take Longer
The CI speed has a great impact on your team velocity, keep it as low as possible.
“That’s impossible. You can’t go faster than the speed of light.”
“Of course not. That’s why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.”
— “Futurama” A Clone of My Own (TV Episode S2.E15).
It turns out that the CI speed defines the “speed of light” in software development. It defines the ultimate barrier that dictates the pace at which any development team can operate. But, unlike the cosmic speed, we can actually accelerate the development “light speed”.
Halted by CI
Imagine a developer ready. The feature has been finished, all has been tested, and only one last step is necessary to deliver it: wait for the CI to give the green light.
This waiting period is not just idle time; it is a bottleneck, slowing down the entire development process.
But it does not seem too much, right? Well, the problem is that CI waiting times compose. A developer does not wait only for its own CI pipeline to run, but also for all the pipelines of fellow developers. If more than one developer finishes at the same time, changes cannot be merged simultaneously, instead, the CI needs to serialize —run one after the…
