I know this is a meme, but just in case someone doesn’t actually know. CI saves literally thousands upon thousands of dev hours a year, even for small teams.
As annoying as it is when someone else breaks the CI pipeline on me, it is utterly invaluable for keeping the vast majority of commits from being able to break other people (and from you breaking others). I can’t imagine not having some form of CI to preventing merging bad code.
Hah, or my current one. Before we had CI you just directly committed to master (on SVN). It was incredible how unstable our build was. It broke basically everyday. Then one of the senior back end guys got promoted to architect and revamped the whole thing. Probably saved the company tens of millions dollars in man hours, at the very least.
Even better is when you restrict merges to trunk/main/master/develop (or whatever you call it) to only happen from the CI bot *after all tests (including builds for all supported platforms) pass. Nobody else breaks the CI pipiline, because breaking changes just don’t merge. The CI pipeline can test itself!
Ops loves CI systems, if the artifact doesn’t come from Jenkins (or friends) it simply doesn’t exist to us.
Probably also causes lots of hours of maintenance and troubleshooting…but it’s a net gain in the end.
I can’t even imagine not having a ci pipeline anymore. Having more than a single production architecture target complete with test sets, Security audits, linters, multiple languages, multiple hour builds per platform… hundreds to thousands of developers… It’s just not possible to even try to make software at scale without it.