3 Steps to Eradicate Flaky CI Builds

Flaky builds in continuous integration (CI) systems pose significant challenges to developers, reducing productivity and trust in the pipeline due to the time lost debugging and rerunning builds. Real-world experiences from teams like Split Payments and AppSignal illustrate the impact, with issues ranging from poor performance to random test failures that obscure genuine problems. Addressing these issues involves team acknowledgment and commitment to solutions, such as using managed build environments and virtualization to ensure stability, isolation, and repeatability. Docker containers further enhance the development and debugging process by providing consistent and reproducible environments across development, CI, and production, allowing developers to control and debug builds effectively. By adopting these practices, teams can improve their CI processes and move towards achieving a reliable and efficient build system.