Has anyone done a study to cost of a build breakage to an organistation?
Let's do some back of the envelope costings, assume a long running build of 30+mins, with 10 devs, probably 50% want to commit during the period or during the period after the build was broken and before a rollback or fix has been committed.
A broken build has distracted atleast 5 people including the build master and they will have to wait or be careful of how they progress so on average that may be about 5hrs of lost productivity.
THAT's EXPENSIVE!!
Sure there are lot's of arguments like make your build faster, well the reality is whatever time your build is, you have disrupted the flow of your team members that has resulted in potentially significant wasted effort.
And in your rush to fix the build you may have not really addressed fundamental issues of the breakage, but just put a quick fix in to get things going.
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Whilst it can be costly, breaking the build is not a bad thing. After all, the CI build is there as a saftey net. Keep your build time down and fail fast.