Slow Builds Were
Killing Velocity.
How Vectorise cut Karbon's CI/CD pipeline by ~70% in six weeks.
Client
Karbon
Industry
SaaS -- Practice Management
Stack
.NET, Azure, SQL Server
Engagement
Ongoing
I engaged Vectorise to strengthen our technical infrastructure, and the results came quickly. Within six weeks, they delivered meaningful improvements across developer experience, build and data pipelines, monitoring, and testing, the areas where specialist expertise added real value. Throughout the engagement, they kept my technology team fully informed and integrated, ensuring the rollout was seamless and effective.
The Challenge
A pipeline that trained engineers to avoid deploying.
Choked PRs
queued for every merge
Every PR triggered a full CI/CD pipeline that stopped features moving dead in their tracks. Context-switching killed productivity across the engineering team.
Serial Test Runs
single agent, every PR
The entire test suite ran sequentially on a single agent, adding roughly a quarter of the total pipeline time to every PR even when most tests were untouched by the change.
Redundant DB Deploys
every commit, every database
A change to any single database triggered the redeployment of every database on the same SQL Server. Nothing was cached. The pipeline was doing maximum work on every run.
What We Did
A team of Vectorise engineers embedded with Karbon's team and developed and rolled out solutions org-wide to cut build times, parallelize tests, and reclaim engineering hours.
~70%
pipeline time reduced
Build Caching
Introduced shared remote build caching across every build pillar. Builds that previously recompiled everything now skip unchanged projects entirely, with cache hits exceeding 95% on a typical PR.
~40%
DB redeploys eliminated
Database Deploy Optimization
Built database change-fingerprinting so untouched databases can skip redeploy. Previously, every database was being redeployed on every change whether it had been touched or not. Now databases that have no changes and no shared dependencies skip the deploy path entirely.
2.7×
test suite speedup
Test Parallelization
Implemented parallelized CI runners so the test suite executes in parallel across multiple agents. Cut test wall time by roughly two-thirds, a 2.7× speedup compared to the previous serial run.
The Results
Six weeks. Engineering capacity reclaimed across the product roadmap.
Pipeline duration
~70%
Faster CI/CD pipeline end-to-end, applied to every pull request shipped after the engagement.
PR success rate
+55.7%
Builds that pass first time mean less rework, fewer retries, and more team time on building features.
Engineering capacity reclaimed
~11%
Faster pipelines and fewer broken builds compound into more time on product, every working day.
CI Run Time Distribution Before Vectorise
% of original pipeline duration
Pipeline Anatomy Before Vectorise
BUILD JOB
Checkout
Restore dependencies
Quality scan begin
Setup + quality scan begin
Compile
Run tests with coverage
Test summary
Await test job
Quality scan end
TEST JOB
Setup + cache restore
Compile (cached)
Coverage setup
Run tests
Upload artifacts
QUALITY GATE
Quality gate
~11% More Engineering Capacity, Without a Single New Hire
The reclaimed pipeline time is the equivalent of growing the team by ~11%.
Capacity Karbon got back without expanding headcount.
Counts shown are illustrative.
Karbon's existing engineers
Capacity gained
Your Pipeline Next?
If your CI/CD takes longer than making coffee, we should talk.