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CI/CD Pipeline Efficiency: Cutting Build Times by 60%

Every minute of CI/CD wait time costs developer productivity. Here's how to cut it.

By Richard Ewing·

The Cost of Slow Pipelines

Average CI/CD pipeline: 15-30 minutes. At 10 deploys/day with a 20-person team: 50-100 developer-hours/week lost to waiting. At $125/hr fully loaded: $6,250-12,500/week.

Optimization priorities: parallel test execution (-40%), caching dependencies (-20%), incremental builds (-30%), right-size runners (-10%), eliminate flaky tests (-15% in reruns).

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Published Work

This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →

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Richard Ewing

The Product Economist — Quantifying engineering economics for technology leaders, PE firms, and boards.