As organizations strive for faster, more reliable software delivery, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines function as the critical arteries of modern development.
However, when these essential pathways become slow, unreliable or require excessive manual intervention, they transform from conduits of innovation into significant sources of friction. This inefficiency does not just delay builds; it actively erodes the developer experience (DevEx), hindering productivity, lowering morale, contributing to burnout and ultimately stifling the pace of progress and innovation.
“The #1 way you can optimize your CI/CD pipelines is to identify and leverage tools that reduce the amount of work that your developers have to invest in the building and maintaining your CI/CD pipelines,” says Kai Tillman, senior engineering manager at Ambassador, an API development company focused on accelerating API development, testing and delivery. “Tools that replace manual steps for environment creation, deployment and testing with simple commands can have an outsized impact on the overall experience building and maintaining the pipelines, allowing for more time to be focused on other tasks.”
Focusing on DevEx through strategic CI/CD optimization can transform the development lifecycle and significantly improve developer productivity. However, it is even more important to first examine the costs of slow pipelines and understand the disruptive nature of flaky tests. Additionally, consider the impact of rapid feedback loops, intelligent automation and streamlined workflows. These factors collectively emphasize how a well-optimized dev loop reduces friction, accelerates iteration cycles and fuels innovation and business success.
I spoke with notable engineering leaders to understand the detrimental effects of inefficient CI/CD on DevEx, as well as the best engineering practices to streamline workflows, reduce wait times and accelerate feedback loops — learning from them why optimizing CI/CD is a fundamental investment in developer happiness and high performance.
How Sluggish CI/CD Drains Developer Experience
Mudit Singh, VP of Product and head of growth at LambdaTest, shares insights from his company’s recent velocity tours — meeting engineering leaders across organizations of all sizes, from
entry-level developers to executive leadership. “Nearly all of them agree that a sluggish CI/CD pipeline does more than delay build times or slow deployment frequency — it erodes the very fabric of a team’s morale and productivity.”
Slow or bottlenecked pipelines create a negative feedback loop. “Overall productivity takes a huge hit when teams have to wait for development feedback on individual commits,” Mudit highlights. “Issues that could be quickly resolved instead take longer to debug, leading to delayed fixes and compounding stress across team members, especially when a breakdown happens just before a critical deployment. That means extended work hours for all teams, sometimes even wasted weekends.” But the impact extends beyond individual frustration. “A sluggish CI/CD process does not just delay deployments; it disrupts the developer feedback loop and creates an environment of stress and uncertainty that permeates the entire organization,” he notes.
Beyond productivity and morale, a poorly functioning CI/CD pipeline can also erode trust across the wider business. Steve Fenton, director of developer relations at Octopus Deploy, describes this as a trust-loss spiral. “When developers struggle to get changes quickly and reliably through the CI/CD pipeline, it doesn’t just slow feedback. A more damaging effect is the loss of trust. Though developers are doing their best to deliver features without regressions or deployment failures, when changes are delayed or cause customer-impacting issues, the business loses confidence in their ability to deliver.” This often leads to increased bureaucracy and slower processes, further exacerbating the problem.
Mary Moore-Simmons, VP of Engineering at Keebo, highlights the toll on engineering happiness and efficiency. “Engineers are typically the most expensive people in a company and making them wait for builds to finish or forcing them to manually fix flaky tests is a major productivity killer,” she explains. “Long pipeline runtimes also force engineers to context switch between different tasks, and context switching is one of the biggest drains on developer velocity.” When engineers are frustrated with inefficient processes, their productivity suffers — and, even worse, they are more likely to leave for companies that prioritize a better DevEx.
Practical Strategies for CI/CD Improvement
Improving CI/CD pipelines and, by extension, DevEx requires a focus on identifying and eliminating bottlenecks while implementing smart automation. Fenton emphasizes the importance of looking for queues. “The crucial insight for improving CI/CD pipelines and developer experience is to search for queues. Code review times, manual testing and heavyweight change approval processes are common choke points that slow work. Delays between development, completion and deployment to production are like cracks in a rock — water seeps in, freezes and breaks the rock apart. Developers are frustrated as they start new work but get interrupted by previous work that is still stuck in the system. And so, context switching increases, reducing developer effectiveness and increasing the chance of errors.”
Moore-Simmons advocates a strong testing strategy and thoughtful pipeline design. “Having a strong testing strategy can be an underutilized technique to optimize CI/CD. When building any product or feature, engineers should create a plan for what should be tested and think deeply about what is most critical to test at each step in the pipeline (local dev, staging, etc.). This allows the team to test the right things at the right time, which can increase the speed of delivery and reduce CI/CD friction. I recommend thoughtfully splitting CI/CD pipelines for your services so teams can operate quickly and more independently. This can be a great way to speed up testing and deployment while empowering each team to fine-tune their testing and deployment processes to maximize both quality and speed for their unique services.”
“We strive to embody the very principles we advocate at LambdaTest when it comes to intelligent test automation,” Mudit shares. “We know faster feedback loops are important, but there is also a significant need to invest in richer, context-aware feedback. That means better reporting and using the right tools to get actionable insights at every stage, especially in testing. Integrating automated test intelligence tools can analyze test failures and generate targeted root cause analyses and even remediation suggestions,” he continues. “This approach not only tells developers that something went wrong but also helps them understand the root cause quickly — whether it is an environmental issue, a dependency failure or even a flaky test. By embedding this intelligence into the pipeline, teams can address problems more efficiently and reduce the cognitive overhead of sifting through raw logs and error messages.”
Automation That Makes Developers More Productive
Automation is the key to a high-performing CI/CD pipeline, but it is crucial to automate the right things in the right way to truly benefit DevEx. Tillman recommends the use of
developer-focused tools. “By leveraging the Blackbird-hosted environments, you can reduce the overhead in infrastructure development needed to get test clusters going. Blackbird’s deployment commands provide an easy way to get code under test and evaluation into this environment with a simple command. Blackbird can be leveraged in your pipeline to keep resources like Mocks up-to-date when changes are made to an API’s OpenAPI spec. All these together can help simplify your pipelines by handling much of the time-consuming overhead for you.”
Moore-Simmons provides an example of smart automation that fosters collaboration: “One smart automation in a CI/CD pipeline is using a linter to drive alignment and collaboration on coding standards and best practices. When teams get together and agree on code quality and standards, it can be a great opportunity to build strong communication and collaboration practices.
Memorializing those standards in a linter, which is regularly reviewed and updated by the team, allows you to drive continuous alignment. This sets clear expectations for engineers and creates a sense of shared goals and purpose on the team, which reduces conflict during code reviews.”
“Manual deployment is the most common trigger for the trust-loss spiral, where mistakes in sequencing or parameters result in broken software,” Fenton emphasizes. “Similarly, scripted deployments creak under the weight of complexity, and nobody feels confident editing them to introduce improvements. Deployments are too fundamental to continuous delivery to be performed by hand, with checklists or using homegrown scripts.” He advocates for a highly automated process based on Lean principles.
Prioritizing DevEx in Your CI/CD Journey
Improving CI/CD and DevEx requires a conscious and ongoing effort, driven by leadership. Tillman, from his engineering purview at Ambassador, highlights the need to reduce developer toil through smart tooling. He sees Blackbird improving the CI/CD journey by “replacing multiple manual steps with a sequence of simple commands” and “leveraging the Blackbird-hosted environments,” which reduces infrastructure overhead. His simplest advice for developers is to find tools that eliminate as much bespoke work as possible within CI/CD pipelines.
“DevOps research highlights the importance of automation and also reminds us that Lean principles can guide improvement efforts,” Fenton stresses. “When a developer has finished coding, the CI/CD pipeline should be a streamlined, high-automation process that validates the new software version and gets it deployed.”
Improving CI/CD pipelines and DevEx is an iterative process that never ends. Moore-Simmons advises against trying to do everything at once: “Gather regular feedback from your engineers, use that to determine the highest-priority and highest-impact work, scope it down as much as practical, tackle the top one or two items and then repeat. Improving CI/CD pipelines and developer experience is like peeling back the layers of an onion: Once you solve your biggest problem, you will find more things to fix.” She encourages teams to “find joy in the continuous improvement process and do not forget to look back and reflect on how far you have come since you started.”
“Conversations with engineering leaders during my recent velocity tours revealed that many of the challenges we assumed were solved years ago — like integrating automated tests directly into CI/CD pipelines — are still very much there,” Mudit notes. “And in many enterprises, automation is not fully integrated into the build processes, with teams still manually triggering tests after every build. The automation of automation is still missing in a lot of companies, and that needs urgent attention.”
Tillman reminds, “as dev teams face increasing code complexity, security concerns and the demand for faster feature releases, optimizing CI/CD ensures stable and automated deployments that keep pace with growing demands. CI/CD optimization is no longer optional, it is about survival.” Investing in CI/CD optimization is ultimately an investment in the success and well-being of your developers, which in turn drives innovation and business growth.
