Presented by Dan Tehranian at 2nd International Workshop on Release Engineering 2014 @ Google HQ on 4/11/14 Workshop Website: http://releng.polymtl.ca/RELENG2014/html/index.html

1. Quantifying the
Business Value of
Release Engineering
Dan Tehranian
tehranian@gmail.com

2. The Language Gap
Continuous Delivery
Agile
Continuous Integration
Vagrant
Jenkins
Puppet
Chef
Tech
ROI
Net Present Value
OpEx
CapEx
EBITDA
Amortization
IRR
Business

3. Principal Engineer &
“Economist in Residence”
Dan Tehranian

4. “Release Engineering as a Force Multiplier”
-John O’Duinn, circa 2013

5. Release Engineering
As a Force Multiplier
Tools++!
Process++!
Culture++
Release Engineers Dev Team

6. But How to Quantify?

7. The Business Value
of RelEng
Very Quantifiable
Quantifiable
w/More Assumptions

8. Example
Improving Build Time
5 hrs -> 20 mins

9. What’s Quantifiable?
• “Fully-Loaded” Cost ($$) / Engineer / Year
• Number of Engineers on Team
• Time Spent Doing a Specific Task
• Number of Times that Task is Repeated
• Overhead of Context-Switching to a New Task
While Waiting

10. Obligatory Reference

11. Best
Estimate
Conservative
Estimate
# of Devs 100 100
Cost / Dev / Yr $225,000 $200,000
# Builds / Wk / Dev 10 5
Build Time
Improvement
4 hr 4 hr
% Loss for
Context Switch
20% 10%
——
Total Dev Time $ / Yr $4,500,000 $1,000,000

12. The Business Value
of RelEng
Very Quantifiable
Quantifiable
w/More Assumptions

13. What’s the Value of
Time to Market?
vs

15. Quantifying the
Business Value of
Release Engineering
Dan Tehranian
tehranian@gmail.com