Why Your Software Team Might Be Wasting Time (and How CI/CD Fixes It)
- Salma Albarwani
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Every minute a developer spends waiting for code to deploy, fixing bugs caused by manual errors, dealing with unreliable environments wastes time and money. If your software delivery process still relies on manual steps, disconnected tools, or slow feedback loops, you're not just behind the curve, you're stuck in a loop that kills innovation. That's where CI/CD comes in.
CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (or Deployment). It's a fundamental shift in how software gets built, tested, and released. At its core, CI/CD is about automating the messy, error prone parts of software development so teams can move faster and deliver more reliable code.
What is Continuous Integration?
Continuous Integration (CI) is all about breaking the habit of waiting. Instead of developers working in isolation and merging code once every few weeks (and dealing with huge conflicts), CI encourages frequent integration into a shared repository. Every commit triggers automated builds and tests, ensuring that bugs are caught early before they snowball into major issues.
This approach reduces the painful end-of-cycle crunch time. No more surprise errors days before a release. With CI, feedback loops tighten. Developers know if something’s broken within minutes, not days. That means fewer bugs in production and more stable applications.
What is Continuous Delivery (and Deployment)?
Continuous Delivery (CD): builds on the foundation of CI by ensuring that every change is not only tested but also packaged and ready for deployment. It’s like having a release button that actually works every time. Code that passes all checks can be pushed to staging or production environments with minimal effort and minimal risk.
When CD extends to Continuous Deployment: it means that code changes automatically flow into production once they pass automated tests without human intervention. This is the ultimate level of automation and agility. For companies releasing features or fixes multiple times a day, this model is a game-changer.
CI/CD is DevOps in Motion:
CI/CD isn’t a standalone concept, it's the heartbeat of DevOps. DevOps promotes a culture of collaboration between development and operations teams. CI/CD provides the tools and processes to make that collaboration effective.
No more throwing code “over the wall” to operations. No more slow, fragile release cycles. CI/CD encourages shared responsibility, transparency, and rapid feedback, all of which are essential for building high-performing teams and resilient systems.
Why It Matters to Your Business:
Faster Time to Market
Elite teams deploy 973x more frequently and have led 6,570x faster than low performer teams.DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) - State of DevOps Report
These exact numbers come from (DevOps Research and Assessment) DORA's widely cited reports, particularly from their earlier studies (e.g., 2019–2021). The precise numbers may vary slightly by year, but the general insight holds: elite teams massively outperform in deployment frequency and lead time.
Improved Quality
DORA Report
DORA categorizes teams by performance levels and consistently shows elite performers have significantly lower change failure rates (e.g., 0-15% compared to 46-60% for low performers).
Greater Innovation / Time Wasted on Fixes
GitLab DevSecOps Survey (2023)
The report mentions that developers spend around 25-30% of their time on issues unrelated to feature development, including fixing bugs, dealing with broken builds, or waiting on manual processes.
Lower Risk / Human Error & Downtime
IBM Research and Gartner Reports
Multiple reports, including IBM's "Cost of a Data Breach" and Gartner analysis, cite human error as a primary contributor to system outages—often 70% or more of incidents.
Stronger Team Morale
Backed by GitLab and Stack Overflow surveys
GitLab and Stack Overflow's annual developer surveys show that developer satisfaction increases with automation, faster feedback loops, and less time spent on toil (manual, repetitive tasks). Whether you're a startup trying to move fast or an enterprise managing complex applications, CI/CD empowers you to deliver better software, faster, and with confidence.
CI/CD isn't just a tool set, it's a mindset. It’s about creating a workflow where change is safe, fast, and reliable. The teams that adopt it are not just more efficient, they're more competitive.
So if your team is still manually merging, testing, and deploying code, ask yourself this: how much time and opportunity are you wasting?
how does the CI/CD work:
starting from Plan and moving through stages like Code, Build, Test, Release, Deploy, Operate, and Monitor, and looping back
Plan —> Code —> Build —> Test —> Release —> Deploy
Stage | Manual | Automated |
PLAN | ✅ Planning, writing specs, preparing tasks (by humans) | ❌ Usually not automated |
CODE | ✅ Writing code, pull requests, reviews | ✅ Trigger builds/tests on code push (e.g. via GitHub Actions) |
BUILD | ❌ Manual compiling rarely done | ✅ Code automatically built by tools like Gradle, Bazel, Jenkins |
TEST | ❌ Manual testing is possible but slow | ✅ Automated tests (unit, integration, UI) run after every build |
RELEASE | ✅ Final approval in some organization | ✅ Version tagging, packaging, and release notes generation |
DEPLOY | ❌ Sometimes approved manually | ✅ Auto-deploy to staging or production using Argo, fluxcd, etc. |
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