The purpose of Continuous Integration is to fail

3 months ago

Continuous Integration (CI) is valuable when it fails, as it prevents bad outcomes by catching mistakes early.
Without CI, mistakes are only caught after deployment, leading to longer, manual, and dangerous feedback loops.
CI acts as a safety net by interrupting the process before deployment if a mistake is detected.
Too much CI can add unnecessary friction and slow down the deployment process without providing value.
Flaky CI, where a failing CI run can pass upon rerun, undermines the reliability of CI.
The only valuable outcome of CI is when it fails, preventing errors from reaching production.
The term 'failure' in CI is misleading as it represents a positive outcome of catching mistakes early.
Proposed changes to CI outcome representations to better reflect the value of failures.

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