Your Build Is Slow Because Everyone Owns It

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000

TL;DR - Nobody decides to have a twenty-five-minute build. It gets there one reasonable step at a time: a new scanner here, an integration suite there, a cache that quietly stopped hitting, a runner pool sized to last year’s headcount. Every team owns a step, so nobody owns the total, and the total is the only number developers experience. Flaky tests finish the job by teaching everyone that red means “press retry”, which is the moment the pipeline stops being a signal. The fix is not a quarterly “speed up CI” sprint. It is treating feedback-loop latency as a platform capability with an owner: a published time budget for push-to-signal, caching and test selection as shared primitives rather than per-repo heroics, runners sized on queue time rather than on the invoice, and flaky tests quarantined with an owner and an expiry date. Measure the wait the developer actually sits through, not the average job duration on a dashboard.

Flaky-Tests on F. Latini - IT Engineer

Your Build Is Slow Because Everyone Owns It