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).