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How to Identify Major Blockers in a CI/CD Pipeline


Reading Time: 7 minutes

Continuous integration, development, and delivery pipelines provide significant benefits to software development. An excellent example of this is “being able to shepherd code changes to production with little-to-no human intervention” like at Mozilla. More broadly, when properly implemented, they reduce time to market and provide greater transparency and reliability of new features and releases.

The question though is: when your pipeline is in active use, how can you regularly identify and remove any significant blockers that work against it being as efficient and effective as possible? I ask this because, like any business endeavor, it’s important to ensure that we’re continually improving.

However, despite being quite a technical and quantitative endeavor, it’s not always easy to know if blockers exist and where they are. As a result, it’s difficult to know how — and where — improvements are required. So over the course of this article, I’m going to help you identify some of the major blockers you may encounter and suggest a range of ways you can remove them by considering a series of questions.

What Is Your Company’s CI/CD Culture?

Before we dive into the technical aspects, I want to ask you about your business’s CI/CD culture. Is it a positive one, where everyone is fully engaged? Do they appreciate its significance on the company’s performance (and ultimate success)? Or are they only marginally aware that CI/CD exists, what it does, why it’s there, and whether it’s working?

As with any subject, the more engaged people are around a topic, the more supportive they’re likely to be. When they’re engaged and supportive, they can become ever more invested in that subject’s success. Its success becomes their success.

Furthermore, when this kind of clear-cut engagement exists, you’re less likely to encounter roadblocks when you need further resources to improve it.



It’s for these reasons that I strongly encourage you to consider your company’s CI/CD culture first. If it’s not an encouraging culture, then work to make it so.

How? Here are three suggestions:

  3. You can hold regular webinars or group chats that show what’s going on and how it’s helping.

These are just a handful of ways. I’m confident you can think of others.

What Are Your Pipeline’s Metrics?

Now let’s consider more quantitative methods; after all, if you don’t know where you are now, you can’t know where and how you need to improve to get to where you’re going.

1 – How quickly can developers provision new environments?


  • How quickly can they provision new development environments?

One of the main advantages that CI and CD bring is the ability to develop new features quickly. If development environments aren’t able to be rapidly provisioned, then this is slowing developers down from being as productive as they can.


2 – How quickly do tests run?

Testing is a tough area to discuss quickly because it’s such a rich and diverse topic. But it’s imperative that we do so! How long does your entire test suite take to run? Does it complete quite quickly, or does it drag on for hours — even days?

To be fair, there is no average runtime, as no two applications are ever the same. And I’m not suggesting that there should be, or even is, a standard minimum or maximum execution time. What I am saying, however, is that it mustn’t take unreasonably long. The longer it takes, the less likely it is that it’s going to be used and the more likely it is that developers will begin to avoid using it, if at all possible.

Given that:

  • Where can you improve its performance?
  • Are all the tests necessary?
  • Have tests been written that don’t measure anything meaningful?
  • Could tests be written more efficiently?


3 – How quickly are features deployed?

What’s the process by which your application, new feature, or bug fix gets deployed? Is it a process that’s organically grown over time into somewhat of a monolithic or convoluted mess? Could it be streamlined or simplified, whether by looking at it with a new set of eyes, bringing on people with dedicated experience, or employing new technologies, such as Docker?



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What Is Your Review Process?


How Transparent Is Your Pipeline?


  • Is this information accessible to everyone?


These include:

  • Group awareness of declining — and improving — quality standards.

As a result, I suggest that, if you don’t do it already, you should begin ensuring that you’re collecting as much information on your pipelines as possible. Then make that information as readily accessible, in as usable a manner, as possible.

Don’t just show the raw numbers though. They’re great. But they don’t always give proper context. Show trends over time as well. Make it easy to know whether the pipeline is improving or declining and why. That way, it’s easy(er) to know what action to take and when.

How Long Does It Take from Story to Feature Release?

Now that we’ve considered a series of areas in isolation, let’s step back and take more of a bird’s-eye view of the pipeline. How long does it take you to go from feature story to feature release?


After you’ve reviewed the situation, consider these questions:

  • Do you have a standard template for writing your stories?
  • How do you publish them?
  • How long is it from when they’re written to when the feature has to be implemented (or abandoned)?
  • Is the way that you’re writing your cards excluding some members of your organization — namely your developers? Said another way, do the cards contain unnecessary jargon, acronyms, or other insider terms?
  • What’s the reporting process from end to end? Is it effective and transparent?



While I’ve not always been as tangible, technical, nor as explicit as I could have been, I believe that these questions are a good starting point to help improve a CI/CD pipeline’s efficacy. If you jump in without either considering the process holistically or appreciating the key areas that need addressing, you run the risk of expending a lot of time and effort for minimal — if any — gain.


It’s a profound and complex area, one that can’t be solved nor improved quickly or easily. But, when done continuously, improving on your CI/CD pipeline can return significant rewards in time, cost, and more.

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