When developing software and maintaining CI/CD and testing pipelines we are often compelled to increase our test coverage by adding more tests, and therefore improve our apps’ quality.

After all, more automation equals better software, right?

There’s a flipside to this equation however, and a point at which we start seeing diminishing returns from each test we add. Taken to extreme, these diminishing returns begin to actively harm our ability to deliver working software.

In this talk we will look at a tale of creating and taming a monster of an all day build (one that really happened to me once), and cover tips, tricks, and tools to help you avoid that scenario in the future - from obvious suggestions such as adding resources to your build machines, to less obvious ones like removing tests altogether.

Deep dive into techniques for making your pipelines run faster:
Picking Resource Classes
Caching techniques
Using Orbs
Test Splitting
Branching
Identifying bottlenecks