Sankey · Diagram Design

CI compute budget · a month of pipeline minutes

12,000 CI minutes split across four pipeline stages, then merge into three outcomes. Band thickness is the data — the flaky-rerun path is the only colored ribbon, because it's the line item worth cutting.

CI compute budget · a month of pipeline minutes Sankey diagram showing 12,000 monthly CI minutes splitting into unit test, E2E, build, and lint stages, then merging into passed, failed, and flaked outcomes, with the flaky-rerun path highlighted as the one accent flow. BUDGET TEST STAGE OUTCOME CI minutes 12,000 min Unit tests 5,200 min E2E 4,000 min Build 2,000 min Lint 800 min Flaked 1,000 min Passed 9,400 min Failed 1,600 min LEGEND Flow · stage routing Flaked path · reruns Node · stage total Two coral ribbons — flaky reruns burn ~8% of the monthly CI budget.

EDITORIAL POINT

Flaky reruns

1,000 of the 12,000 monthly minutes — about 8% of the whole budget — go to tests that failed once and passed on rerun. That's the one line item this diagram argues for cutting.

Where the minutes go

Unit tests and E2E together are three-quarters of the budget (9,200 of 12,000 minutes). Build and lint are comparatively cheap at 1,900 and 900.

Net outcome

9,400 minutes pass clean, 1,600 fail for real. The remaining 1,000 are pure overhead — neither signal nor failure, just retries.

ci compute budget · sankey example · diagram design