A practical guide to speeding up an Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline for a monorepo with 20 projects. The core technique is adding a 'ProjectMarker' stage that uses git diff to detect which projects were modified in the latest commit, then conditionally builds, deploys, and tests only those affected projects. The approach reduced pipeline runtime from ~60 minutes to ~23 minutes (50%+ improvement), with further savings by running only affected Cypress tests. Benefits include lower resource consumption, fewer deployment errors, and faster developer feedback loops.
