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To find delays in a CI/CD pipeline, trace a representative change from version control to release and record, at every step, both elapsed time and time spent doing the work. The gap between those figures can reveal waiting or handoffs to investigate; it does not, by itself, prove the cause. Track rework and production outcomes too, so a faster pipeline does not come at the cost of reliability or security.
What counts as a CI/CD delay?
A change’s total delivery time includes active work and time spent waiting. Build and test duration is only part of that journey: a change may also wait for review, security checks, an available environment, an approval, or a release window. Mapping only the automated jobs can therefore miss substantial delays.
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DORA recommends using value-stream mapping to record total elapsed time and value-add time for each process from version control through release. A large gap between elapsed and active work is a useful signal to investigate possible queues, handoffs, or other waits—not proof that any one of them is the root cause. DORA describes value-stream mapping as a way to discover and anticipate bottlenecks: DORA’s continuous-delivery guidance.
How to map one change through the pipeline
- Choose a representative change. Select a recent change that reflects the workflow you want to understand. Agree on a start point, such as when it enters version control, and an end point, such as when it is released.
- Draw the path it actually takes. Include automated jobs and manual steps: code review, testing, security review, change management, environment provisioning, deployment, and any release step. Follow the change across team boundaries rather than stopping at the CI system.
- Record elapsed and value-add time at every process. Elapsed time is the full time from entering a step to leaving it. Value-add time is time spent doing the work. Keep the definitions consistent across stages, and note retries or returns for correction.
- Measure rework. Track the percentage of work sent back because it was not done right the first time. DORA calls this percentage complete and accurate (%C/A); a low figure can signal a process worth examining alongside long elapsed times.
- Review the map with the teams involved. Ask the people who own the steps to validate the sequence and explain the waits. Agree on a desired future-state process and the capacity to make improvements before changing the workflow.
One change can expose a candidate delay, but it cannot establish whether that delay is typical. Repeat the mapping across enough representative changes to distinguish a recurring pattern from a one-off event. Compare changes with consistent boundaries and record meaningful differences in their paths.
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Where to look for delays
Source control and code review
Inspect whether changes arrive in large batches, whether branches or review queues accumulate, and how long changes wait before review starts. Measure actual waiting before changing the branching or review process. DORA recommends trunk-based development with short-lived branches as a continuous-delivery practice, but the map should show whether that practice addresses a delay in your workflow.
Build and test
Separate time waiting for a runner or other resources from build work, test execution, retries, and time spent resolving failures. DORA emphasizes quick feedback, reliable automated tests, continuous testing, and adequate test data. A systematic review of 69 papers published through June 1, 2016 grouped approaches to continuous integration, delivery, and deployment around reducing build and test time, improving result visibility, supporting automated testing, detecting faults and violations, security and scalability, and dependable deployment. Its publication window makes it useful as a taxonomy of concerns, not evidence of current tool adoption: the review’s abstract and methodology.
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Security checks and approvals
Put security review, required approvals, and change-management steps on the map rather than treating them as invisible overhead. The goal is not to remove controls blindly, but to identify whether their timing, sequencing, or handoffs can improve without weakening necessary protections. DORA recommends pervasive security and highlights the particular importance of testing and security in regulated and safety-critical domains.
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Environments and deployment
Measure waits for test and production environments separately from deployment work. Check for environment availability, manual release steps, service dependencies, and database changes. DORA recommends deployment automation, managed database changes, monitoring and observability, and loosely coupled teams as practices that support continuous delivery.
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Cross-team handoffs
Include the people and teams that own each process. A handoff can create a wait, but a long elapsed time alone does not show which team, approval, or dependency caused it. Use the stage timings and conversations with process owners to identify the specific step that needs closer examination.
Pair pipeline timings with delivery and stability measures
Stage-level data explains where elapsed time accumulates. Outcome measures help determine whether a change to the pipeline actually improves delivery without making production less stable. Track a consistent local definition of:
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- Lead time for changes: the time from the agreed starting point to release.
- Deployment frequency: how often the team deploys.
- Change failure rate: how often a deployment results in a failure under your chosen definition.
- Time to restore service: how long recovery takes after a service-impacting failure.
- Reliability or service objectives: measures that show whether the service continues to meet its expected outcomes.
Metric labels and boundaries are not uniform across reports or software. DORA’s 2021 report page describes five measures for its performance clusters: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to restore service, change failure rate, and reliability. DORA’s Core Model and some contemporary product documentation give reliability or service-level objectives a separate role alongside four delivery metrics. State which definitions and time boundaries your team uses rather than treating one list as timeless: DORA’s 2021 report summary.
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Decide whether a change is justified
Use the map to form a specific hypothesis—for example, that a recurring resource queue or approval handoff is adding elapsed time. Then choose an intervention aimed at that measured issue, and compare the same stage and delivery outcomes before and after. A change is more persuasive when it reduces the relevant delay or rework while maintaining change failure, recovery, reliability, and security outcomes.
When assessing a process, architecture, test, environment, or tool change, consider:
- Which observed wait or rework does it address?
- Does it reduce elapsed time, active work, or both?
- What happens to change failures, restoration time, reliability, and security?
- Does it work with the existing toolchain, or add another integration or handoff?
- What changes to team responsibilities or processes are required?
Tool adoption alone is not a diagnosis or a guaranteed fix. DORA notes that pipeline implementation often accompanies process and architecture changes. The CD Foundation’s 2024 report summary describes an association between CI/CD tool use and better performance, while also reporting worse performance when developers used multiple tools of the same form and suggesting interoperability as a likely explanation. These findings do not rank vendors or prove that a particular tool caused the difference. The report says 83 percent of developers report involvement in DevOps-related activities; its methodology combines six Developer Nation surveys from Q3 2020 to Q1 2023, which together reached more than 125,000 respondents worldwide. The latest survey data included was collected from December 2022 through February 2023, so the combined reach should not be mistaken for the report’s analytic sample size: the CD Foundation / SlashData report summary and methodology.
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Shorter lead times matter only when the team can still release safely and serve users reliably. DORA’s 2024 report summary discusses potential tradeoffs involving stability or throughput in relation to AI and internal developer platforms, and highlights user-centricity and stable priorities. Google Research’s record says the report heard from more than 39,000 professionals; that is report participation, not a measurement of CI/CD pipeline duration. See DORA’s 2024 findings summary and Google Research’s report record.
Continuous integration is only one part of continuous delivery. Reliable tests, deployment automation, version control, continuous testing, observability, available test data, security, and team design all contribute to a team’s ability to release safely. Treat a faster stage as an intermediate result; the broader test is whether the complete delivery path improves without undermining service outcomes.
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