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I am missing the point of the article. Why does build failing require any incentive or punishment?

If a build fails, nothing changes in the production environment. The developer can troubleshoot and fix the build. Pretty much like when local compilation fails due to a syntax error.

Why does such a routine thing as a build failure need to be rewarded or punished?

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Once upon a time, builds used to be very expensive and take forever. Entire development teams shared a single single-pipe build server, and builds could not even be built locally first.

We're (mostly) past those times now, but "breaking the build" is still in the mind of many devs as a negative behavior.

I'd imagine 'breaking the build' is, for almost everyone nowadays (and in most situations), a very minor issue. But it's still, all else equal, a net negative, however small.

Breaking a build once, for whatever reason, probably isn't a big deal. But breaking a build frequently certainly could be.

If you break our build, your pipeline fails and your code is not merged. Simple as that. The master branch doesn't break, because we don't merge broken code into it.

It’s a good habit to keep the commited code buildable. For team members, easier history changes, git bisect, etc.

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