What should our CI/CD pipeline include as a minimum?

Pipelines grow by accretion and end up slow and mistrusted. This is the minimum set that earns its runtime.

The seven stages

Build — produce one immutable artifact, promoted unchanged through every environment. Rebuilding per environment means you never test what you ship. Unit tests — fast, run on every commit, block the merge. Static analysis and dependency scan — linting plus a check for known vulnerabilities in third-party packages. Integration tests — against real dependencies, in an ephemeral environment. Deploy to staging — automatic, no approval. Smoke tests — a handful of checks that confirm the thing actually starts and serves traffic. Deploy to production — one click, with an automated rollback path.

Keep it under ten minutes to staging

Past ten minutes, developers stop waiting for the pipeline and start batching changes, which is the behaviour continuous integration exists to prevent. Parallelise test stages and cache dependencies before adding more checks.

Make failures unambiguous

A red pipeline should point at one thing. If a failure requires opening three logs to interpret, people will start re-running it hoping it passes, and the pipeline stops being a signal.

What to add later

Performance regression tests, canary deploys and automated database migration checks are all worth having, and none of them belong in version one.