Optimizing CI/CD for Trust, Observability and Developer Well-Being
As engineering teams grapple with increasingly distributed architectures, microservices and the need for rapid innovation, the technical challenges of building and maintaining reliable CI/CD systems at scale have become more important than ever.
However, successfully navigating these technical complexities is also about achieving speed and efficiency in software delivery while creating a positive and productive experience for the engineers who build and maintain these systems. Beyond the obvious metrics of build times and deployment frequency, there’s the deeper imperative of ensuring developer trust in the pipeline, providing meaningful observability that empowers them, and ultimately fostering the well-being of the engineers who rely on these systems every day.
“The most effective way to optimize your CI/CD pipelines is by identifying and leveraging tools that lessen the amount of effort your developers need to invest in building and maintaining them,” comments Kai Tillman, senior engineering manager at Ambassador, an API development company focused on accelerating API development, testing, and delivery. “By replacing manual steps for tasks like environment creation, deployment, and testing with simple commands, you can significantly impact the overall experience of building and maintaining these pipelines, ultimately allowing developers more time to focus on other tasks,” he explains.
I spoke to notable leaders who shared their engineering practices to explore the critical technical aspects of CI/CD optimization, explaining how their engineering teams build pipelines enabling developer trust, providing deep insights into the software delivery process, and ultimately contributing to a more sustainable and positive developer experience.
Technical Debt of Sluggish and Flaky Pipelines
Developers must be confident that the pipeline will reliably build, test and deploy their code. However, sluggish pipelines, particularly flaky tests, can severely undermine this trust. Matthew Jones, distinguished engineer and chief Ansible architect at Red Hat, identifies “reduced trust in the pipeline” as a primary, often underestimated, negative impact of slow CI/CD. “The number one thing I always think about when it comes to our pipelines is reduced trust in the pipeline,” says Jones, emphasizing that slow pipelines often signal deeper underlying issues within the system.
Shawn Ahmed, CPO at CloudBees, adds that beyond frustration, a sluggish pipeline directly impacts innovation and autonomy. “One of the most underestimated impacts is the loss of creativity and innovation. When developers feel their contributions are stalled without explanation, they become disengaged.” This also inspires a culture of isolation and diminished collaboration. Ahmed underscores, “Additionally, confidence and autonomy take a hit because developers want to own their work, but a sluggish pipeline makes them feel helpless — trapped in a cycle of waiting instead of building.” Strive for transparent and efficient pipelines that provide developers with timely feedback, fostering a sense of ownership and control over their work.
Martin Reynolds, field CTO at Harness, elaborates on how flaky tests specifically erode this trust: “Flaky tests don’t just waste time — they create distrust. When developers start expecting failures, they stop seeing the pipeline as a reliable source of truth. The worst outcome is workarounds: instead of fixing the issue, they disable tests or bypass them altogether.” This eventually erodes confidence in the entire CI/CD process.
Many engineering leaders echo this concern, pointing out the insidious cultural shifts flaky tests can cause. “When failures feel random and unreliable, developers question whether the system is working for them or against them. This not only leads to frustration but also a culture of blame. More insidiously, it shifts mindset and behaviours in ways that hurt long-term productivity — teams may start ignoring failures altogether… prioritizing feature delivery over quality,” Ahmed explained in our email interview. And this highlights a dangerous technical debt that can accumulate when unreliable tests are simply ignored rather than addressed at their root cause. Implement robust mechanisms for identifying, isolating, and addressing the root causes of flaky tests to prevent a decline in code quality and team morale.
Tillman also mentioned the foundational role of reliable infrastructure in building trust. For example, by leveraging tools like Blackbird, which offers hosted environments, you can reduce the overhead in infrastructure development needed to get test clusters going. “Consistent and reliable environment management is a critical technical component for ensuring a trustworthy pipeline. And keeping that in mind, we engineered our platform to simplify this process. Blackbird’s Deployment commands provide an easy way to get code under test and evaluation into a dedicated environment with a simple command,” he explains. Ensure your CI/CD infrastructure is stable and reliable, potentially leveraging tools that simplify environment management to reduce overhead and build developer confidence.
Technical Requirements for Meaningful Feedback
While speed is often cited as a key metric for CI/CD pipelines, the quality and actionability of the feedback provided are equally, if not more, important for developers. Jones, emphasizing the need for deep observability, stresses, “Don’t just tell me that the steps of the pipeline succeeded or failed, quantify that success or failure. Show me metrics on test coverage and show me trends and performance-related details. I want to see stack traces when things fail. I want to be able to trace key systems even if they aren’t related to code that I’ve changed because we have large complex architectures that involve a lot of interconnected capabilities that all need to work together.” This level of technical insight empowers developers to understand and resolve issues quickly, highlighting the importance of implementing comprehensive monitoring and logging within your CI/CD pipeline to provide developers with detailed insights into build, test, and deployment processes.
And shifting feedback earlier in the development lifecycle serves everyone well. The key is shifting feedback earlier in the process, ensuring it is contextual, before code is merged. For example, running security scans at the pull request stage, rather than after deployment, ensures developers get actionable feedback while still in context. “It feels like an extra step, but catching issues earlier prevents costly rework and keeps engineers focused on shipping high-quality code,” Reynolds advocates, explaining how generative AI (GenAI) can provide contextual information on resolving the issue, while the developer is still in flow. This approach represents a significant technical advancement in providing timely and relevant feedback. It underscores the value of integrating static analysis and security scanning tools into your pre-commit or pull request workflows to provide developers with immediate feedback on their code changes.
Highlighting the role of developer-focused tools in providing better insights, Tillman notes, “Seek out tools that can be leveraged in your pipeline to keep resources like mocks up-to-date when changes are made to an API’s OpenAPI spec.” Together, these can help simplify your pipelines by handling much of the time-consuming overhead. And by automating tasks like keeping mocks current, the pipeline provides more reliable and consistent feedback during testing, suggesting the benefit of exploring and adopting tools that automate repetitive tasks within your CI/CD pipeline, ensuring that developers receive accurate and up-to-date feedback.
Automation for Developer Empowerment
Automation is the engine of modern CI/CD, but the focus should be on “smart” automation that genuinely improves the developer experience rather than just adding layers of complexity. Jones emphasizes the technical sophistication of smart automation. “What I love to see the most is smart testing and efficient deployments. Having the pipeline understand what has changed (and what might be dependent on that), run just those necessary tests, and then combine that with an efficient deployment process focusing on those components as well. This only really works if you have a high degree of trust in your system and architecture. It’s really the only way to get to lightning-fast dev-build-test-deploy processes.” This type of smart automation also extends to infrastructure management, where tools can automatically provision and manage environments, reducing the burden on developers.
Reynolds points to the emerging role of AI in smart automation. “AI-powered test management tools can proactively identify and address flaky tests before they disrupt workflows. A great example is using GenAI in CI to automatically generate release notes for each change and update them in the repo and developer portal. Developers often skip or delay writing release notes, but this automation ensures that every change is documented in real time, improving visibility and maintaining a useful changelog.” These examples showcase how technical innovations can automate traditionally manual and often overlooked tasks. And AI is particularly useful for automated security checks, identifying potential vulnerabilities early in the process without requiring manual intervention.
But automation isn’t about replacing developers — it’s about freeing them to focus on creativity, problem-solving, and building what truly matters. “Remember, your best developers have the expertise and wisdom that AI can’t replicate. Finding the right model for your team to use AI properly won’t just get you more code, it can get you something better,” Tillman noted. For example, AI can offer huge efficiency increases in the right spots — generating boilerplate code for one. AI-assisted code generation can replace rote manual work like setting up authentication, freeing up developers to focus on more interesting and innovative things.
Another powerful aspect of advanced automation is the ability to implement automated rollback mechanisms, providing developers with a safety net and increasing their confidence in deploying changes.
Technical Solutions for Reducing Developer Toil
The technical choices made in designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines have a direct impact on developer well-being. Reynolds highlights the problem of developer toil. “Slow pipelines force developers out of flow, making them context-switch or, worse, just sit idle. If a build takes 20 minutes, developers won’t start something new — they’ll wait for it to finish, wasting valuable time. Harness’ recent State of Software Delivery 2025 report found that 78% of developers spend at least 30% of their time on manual, repetitive tasks. That’s time they should be innovating.” And so, to reduce the technical toil and maximize developer productivity, engineering teams should prioritize optimizing their CI/CD pipelines to reduce build times and eliminate unnecessary waiting periods.
Jones emphasizes the role of tooling in supporting good testing practices. “It’s really important that developer tooling lends itself to good testing and it’s just as important for the CI platform to encourage good testing practices. Investment in maturing both of those areas is important for both trust, as well as efficiency.” Providing developers with the right technical tools and a supportive CI/CD platform is essential for their well-being and productivity. Organizations should invest in robust developer tooling and CI/CD platforms that facilitate effective testing practices and provide developers with the support they need to ensure code quality and pipeline reliability.
Tillman suggests reducing toil by trying to find tools that let you limit as much bespoke work as possible from the CI/CD pipelines. “Adopting platforms and tools that handle common CI/CD tasks can free developers from the burden of maintaining complex custom scripts and configurations. If I used my own tool, Blackbird for example, to demonstrate how it cuts down on bespoke CI/CD work, Blackbird does a lot of work that streamlines development before you even enter the CI/CD pipeline, thus streamlining it. By doing the heavy lifting upfront, it reduces manual errors and speeds up the API testing phase. This means that when your CI/CD pipeline kicks in, you’re dealing with well-validated, optimized code,” he remarks.
The result is a smoother deployment with fewer hiccups, reducing downtime and lowering cloud costs. Now, you have a better-performing CI/CD pipeline, which equals less toil and happier developers in the long run. To achieve this, development teams should actively seek out and adopt platforms and tools that automate common CI/CD tasks, minimizing the need for manual, bespoke work and freeing up developer time for more strategic initiatives.
Measuring Success and Embracing Innovation in CI/CD
Optimizing CI/CD for technical excellence and developer well-being requires a strategic vision from engineering leadership. “The best mindset is to start measuring success on both sides, both for the developers and the pipelines themselves,” Jones advises. “You must be able to measure the quality of your product, and that starts with defining the quality gate. And developers need to be involved in building the tools and writing the tests themselves.” With the tools and metrics in place, focus on the feedback loops and shortening the time loop to allow the developers the space to fix and improve on those tools. Engineering leaders should establish clear metrics for both developer experience and pipeline performance, actively involving developers in defining and improving these metrics to foster a sense of ownership.
But it’s time also to stop thinking of CI/CD and developer experience (DevEx) as separate problems. Reynolds urges leaders to view CI/CD and DevEx as interconnected. “A frictionless CI/CD pipeline is core to great DevEx. When pipelines are fast, reliable, and automated, developers spend less time firefighting and more time building.” He emphasizes the importance of treating DevEx as a product. Organizations should adopt a mindset where the CI/CD pipeline is treated as an internal product focused on delivering a seamless and efficient experience for developers.
Ahmed strongly advocates for a similar mindset shift. “Leaders need to treat the developer experience as a true customer experience. Just as companies invest in making their external products seamless and intuitive, they must do the same for the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) and the tools that support it.” He suggests a practical step is to “dedicate a platform engineering team to own, build, and maintain the pipeline as a real product,” reinforcing that “investing in developer experience isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have,’ it directly impacts business performance, innovation, and company culture and morale.” Leadership should dedicate resources, potentially through a platform engineering team, to own and continuously improve the CI/CD pipeline as a core product for their developers, recognizing its direct impact on business outcomes.
Tillman points out the ongoing evolution of CI/CD and the need for continued focus on developer needs, stating, “Conversations with engineering leaders during conference visits reveal 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. In many enterprises, automation isn’t fully integrated into the build processes, with teams still manually triggering tests after every build.” Automation is still missing at a lot of companies, and that needs urgent attention. Beyond that, organizations must embrace the reality that integrating AI tools early in the process not only streamlines but also enriches their testing workflows.
Organizations should continuously evaluate their CI/CD practices, stay informed about emerging challenges and leverage fast technologies like AI to proactively address developer needs and optimize their pipelines. However, ultimately, measuring the success of CI/CD initiatives extends beyond traditional metrics to encompass the experience and productivity of the development teams. Embracing a mindset that prioritizes developer well-being and continuously seeks innovative ways to improve the development lifecycle is crucial for long-term success.
Building Resilient and Developer-Centric CI/CD Systems
The building journey of truly effective CI/CD pipelines is a continuous process that requires a strong technical understanding and a deep focus on the needs and experiences of developers. By prioritizing trust through reliable systems, implementing robust observability for meaningful feedback, embracing smart automation powered by technical innovation, and consciously working to reduce developer toil, engineering teams can build resilient and developer-centric CI/CD systems. Tillman (of Ambassador) reminds us of the importance of a technical imperative in optimizing CI/CD: one that not only accelerates software delivery but also fosters a thriving and productive engineering culture.
