Quantifying the Business Value of DevOps

Abstract:

Summary

Within the software development community the practices of continuous integration, continuous delivery, and other development process improvements have become widely adopted in recent years. It’s generally accepted that these improvements to tools, process, and culture will have a positive impact on a software product’s time to market, quality, feature set, etc. But how can one quantify the business value of these development process enhancements?

Building on the RELENG 2013 keynote “Release Engineering as a Force Multiplier” by John O'Duinn, this talk will cross the disciplines of technology, economics, and finance to provide a quantitative and practical walk­through of how to bridge the gap between technologists and business management.

Details

DevOps engineers are in a unique position to deliver an extraordinary amount of value to an R&D organization. By driving development process efficiencies within an organization, a DevOps engineer has the opportunity to deliver many times more value than most software developers by increasing the productivity of each engineer on the team. Creating this value is a challenge that DevOps engineers continually take on, but measuring the value generated by these efforts is regularly overlooked.

Given that there is no precise template for how every R&D team should operate, DevOps engineers must use their creativity and insight to identify the specific opportunities for improvement within their teams. This talk will discuss common technical, organizational, and process pitfalls that plague organizations. It will also discuss the technical details andquantifiable business value of previously completed projects that have generated millions of dollars of value, for example: automating the creation of development environments with Vagrant, improving product build times by 15x via Jenkins, and re­architecting the means by which terabytes of build artifacts were distributed to VMware’s global R&D organization.

Another obstacle in generating this value is obtaining buy­in from stakeholders. This talk will cross over into the field of finance and describe how to bridge the language gap between technologists and the business school­educated decision­makers they will need to influence. By learning how to properly quantify and advocate potential improvements to these decision makers, DevOps engineers can be more successful in delivering on their ideas and ultimately deliver millions of dollars of value to their R&D organizations.

Speaker:

Dan Tehranian is a Principal Engineer and the “Economist in Residence” at Virtual Instruments, Inc., a dynamic and rapidly growing technology company headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley. Prior to Virtual Instruments, Dan was a senior release engineer at VMware during its explosive growth years, 2007­2012.

In his 18 year technology career, Dan has contributed in various technical roles ranging from IT, QA, product development, release engineering, DevOps, and R&D management. He has worked in organizations of all sizes ranging from early­round startups to mega­cap corporations.

Dan studied Computer Science at UMass­Amherst and Economics at Harvard.