What is the main disadvantage of CICD?

The main disadvantage of CICD can be the risk of frequent failures in production due to insufficient maturity of processes and test automation.

This is because each small feature or fix is promptly delivered to production. If:

• Automated tests do not cover critically important functionality or are not performed at all necessary levels (unit, integration, UI).
• The quality of written tests is low, tests are unstable ("flaky tests") or give many false positives/negatives.
• Code review and test review processes are not effectively established.
• Monitoring and alert systems for failures in production are not properly configured.

then the risk of bugs in production significantly increases, which can lead to a deterioration of user experience, financial losses, and damage to reputation.

Other potential disadvantages (less significant as "main"):

• High initial costs for implementing and configuring tools.
• The need to change the team culture and improve the qualifications of specialists.
• Complexity of supporting a large number of tools and dependencies in the pipeline.
• Increased requirements for infrastructure and resources for fast builds and deployments.

But with the correct approach to test automation, monitoring, and streamlined processes, the risks associated with frequent failures are minimized, and the advantages of CICD prevail.