Patterns for Designing CI/CD Workflows

Leandro Sousa, Filipe Correia

CI/CD pipelines are difficult to build and maintain, and information about them is scattered across empirical studies, practitioner books, and catalogues of 'smells'. We collected candidate practices and anti-practices converted them into patterns, and then consolidated these into patterns. These patterns address issues such as security, pipeline scheduling, workflow structure, performance and failure and release management. Each pattern is contextualised and describes the problem it solves, the forces at play, the solution and the consequences.