You can build it, but can you ship it?

The fastest software teams run their main-branch workflows 10 times as often as the median. And the gap keeps growing.

At the start of the year, teams were struggling to validate the flood of code coming from AI-assisted development. Now builds are passing more often, workflows are finishing faster, and failures are getting fixed sooner. Yet most teams still aren’t shipping any faster.

Developers are juggling more branches, more projects, and more unfinished work. AI has made it easier to start new tasks, but for most teams, getting those changes reviewed, validated, and merged remains a challenge. Meanwhile, the leaders are taking on even more work and increasing their delivery velocity.

Based on more than 22 million CircleCI workflows, the 2026 State of Software Delivery Q3 Pulse report reveals what’s holding most teams back and how the leaders ship faster.

In this report, you’ll learn:

• Why faster, more reliable validation hasn’t translated into faster delivery for most teams
• How growing work in progress is creating new bottlenecks as AI expands development capacity
• What top performers do differently to get changes onto main in fewer cycles, and where your team can focus to catch up