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CI can totally cost time, especially if it doesn't have a team of good engineers keeping it running sanely and ensuring it tells you useful things on failures.

CI can totally cost time, especially if it doesn't have a team of good engineers keeping it running sanely and ensuring it tells you useful things on failures. A CI bot which waits 24 hours then says "no", with a text file that crashes your browser and ultimately only contains the information 'exit code nonzero', which fails for reasons totally unrelated to your code change is dubious as a value add system. If that bot is also a non-negotiable gate on shipping things you get a bunch of other antipatterns, like massive code patches to decrease how often you have to roll the die and a tendency to hit retry every day or so until the probability that it's actually your patch that's broken gets high enough that you try to debug it locally, at which point you may be unable to reproduce the blocking error anyway. The real question is whether that pathologically rubbish implementation is still better than shipping without CI, which rather depends on whether your engineers ship code that works without the guide rails, which to a fair approximation they do not. Thus it might still be a net win for product quality but saving time is harder to see.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Setting up a decent CI pipeline on GitHub with GitHub Actions is super, super easy - less than a day's work for a basic initial implementation. Of course, the difficult part about managing a CI pipeline is writing quality tests, ensuring your tests don't take forever, deciding the right balance between mocking out 3rd party runtime service dependencies vs. calling their dev versions in your tests, etc. But this is why I argue that the bare minimum should just be to have the CI pipeline created. If you don't have that, you are definitely going to screw over future you. Once that's there you can balance the cost/benefits of how much to invest in your test suite and test coverage.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Setting up a decent CI pipeline on GitHub with GitHub Actions is super, super easy - less than a day's work for a basic initial implementation. Of course, the difficult part about managing a CI pipeline is writing quality tests, ensuring your tests don't take forever, deciding the right balance between mocking out 3rd party runtime service dependencies vs. calling their dev versions in your tests, etc. But this is why I argue that the bare minimum should just be to have the CI pipeline created. If you don't have that, you are definitely going to screw over future you. Once that's there you can balance the cost/benefits of how much to invest in your test suite and test coverage.