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Automated pipelines have become an integral part of our daily workflow. As the pipelines become increasingly important, the demands placed on them rise proportionally.

As with many things, a great pipeline operates seamlessly in the background, while a poorly designed one becomes a constant irritation.

Are you publishing your artefacts every time the pipeline runs, running all steps in a sequence, or installing all the tools every time a new build starts?

In this talk, I will address these antipatterns and more I have encountered during my work as a consultant, explaining why I consider them such and what you should do instead.

After listening to this talk, you will better understand what makes a pipeline great and concrete things you can do to improve it and shorten the feedback loop.

Devoxx

A conference talk covering nine CI/CD pipeline antipatterns and their corresponding best practices. Key antipatterns include: running all steps on every trigger (the 'ritual'), hoarding artifacts indefinitely, ordering steps aesthetically rather than by failure likelihood, using a single monolithic pipeline instead of parallel workflows, wrapping CLI tools in unnecessary action wrappers, over-engineering pipelines into complex software projects, starting from scratch on every run instead of caching, colliding with parallel pipeline runs via shared resources, and running pipelines on underpowered machines. Practical patterns offered include conditional workflows based on file changes or triggers, artifact-based parallelism, build output caching (not just dependency caching), using Makefiles or similar tools to keep logic platform-agnostic, and using unique identifiers like git SHAs to avoid resource collisions. A real-world example shows pipeline duration reduced from 60+ minutes to 8–12 minutes over two months.

Pipeline Patterns and Antipatterns - Things your Pipeline Should (Not) Do by Daniele Raniz Raneland