How long should your CI take?

At every single company I&#x27;ve ever worked the company issued laptop has been significantly faster than the machines provisioned for CI (i.e. m1 mac vs Github action free tier runners). Consequently I don&#x27;t usually push code without running the tests locally, it&#x27;s such a faster feedback loop.<p>I&#x27;ve always wondered if it would be possible to design some proof of work concept where you could hash your filesystem + test artifacts to verify tests passed for a specific change.<p>FWIW in yeas of development I&#x27;ve never had an issue where &quot;it works on my machine&quot; doesn&#x27;t equate to the exact same result in CI.

Seems to assume that people are actively&#x2F;idly waiting for CI to pass and then start the review? Or they&#x27;ve done the review, wait for CI to pass then hit merge?<p>Most projects I&#x27;ve worked on with multiple contributors on have had a merge queue where you simply tell it to merge if&#x2F;when the CI passes, then you can move on with your day.

My favourite CI&#x2F;CD build discovery was `find .` (recursive file listing) being called after each step. (maybe like 12 total steps, 6 being the usual dependancy fetch, unit tests, smoke tests etc, and the other 6 being just this file listing task.)<p>CircleCI dutifully polling the ~750k-line stdout for the find command was taking up about 3 minutes of our 5 minute process. Was done so someone could debug a failing build... supposedly.

The missing data in that research is org size. If you&#x27;ve got 5-10 developers in a group, I don&#x27;t see any of this making much difference in anyone&#x27;s productivity. OTOH, if you&#x27;re in an org with 100+ developers and every merge that goes in before you means some sort of conflict resolution, then yes, this might actually be important.

I&#x27;ve worked in k8s hybrid cloud automation for the past few years, and it requires deploying a k8s cluster, installing our services, and then running tests against the cluster. Our pre-merge pipeline takes 3 hours minimum and often much longer. It&#x27;s definitely a drag on productivity but in a lot of complex multi-cloud environments with tons of moving pieces, I haven&#x27;t yet seen a CI system achieve much better.

&quot;Developer Productivity for Humans, Part 4: Build Latency, Predictability, and Developer Productivity&quot; [1] (discussion[2]) in the IEEE Software magazine earlier this year is a better look at this. TL;DR: less time than it currently takes.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computer.org&#x2F;csdl&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;so&#x2F;2023&#x2F;04&#x2F;10176199&#x2F;1OAJyfknInm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computer.org&#x2F;csdl&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;so&#x2F;2023&#x2F;04&#x2F;10176199&#x2F;1...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37377690">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37377690</a>

Is CI even worth it anymore? To be honest, I prefer testing on my local machine. This seem unecessary.