How Hexagonal Architecture Cut My CI Time From 20 Minutes to 5

A Laravel team spent a year moving from database-heavy tests to hexagonal architecture with application-owned interfaces and in-memory adapters.

CI got slower during the migration, but once most tests no longer depended on migrations, transactions, or the database, build time dropped sharply.

The final result was CI shrinking from roughly 20–24 minutes to about 5 minutes.

The case shows how decoupling business logic from framework and database dependencies can dramatically improve test speed and feedback loops.