Build Pattern: Green-lit build
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What to do? Dedicate some capacity to those builds that could actually take priority. How you implement depends on your continuous integration system. On CruiseControl (the original one), I made a seperate server for this. I'm implementing the same thing on Team City at the moment and I've added an environment variable to the build agents that I want to reserve for fast builds. Any build that is longer than 15 minutes is told not to use it if the variable exists.
One might argue that I'm not making best use of the CI server by doing this. That doesn't matter. People are more expensive than Continuous Integration servers; let's optimise the system for them.
(image from Ted Percival)