Calculating the business value of software delivery
Chief Executive Officer
For engineering leaders and technology decision-makers, CI/CD metrics have always been more than just operational measurements – they’re direct indicators of developer experience and team productivity. Every failed build, slow pipeline, or delayed deployment directly impacts your developers’ ability to deliver value.
While many technology investments leave you guessing about their impact, CI/CD is different: We can translate software delivery metrics into precise dollar values, connecting technical improvements directly to business outcomes. The metrics we use to measure CI/CD performance – build duration, throughput, recovery time, and success rate – have always had direct implications for the bottom line. After working with thousands of technology-forward organizations, we’ve seen how even minor improvements can translate into millions in recovered engineering costs and accelerated innovation.
In this analysis, we’ll walk through precise formulas that translate CI/CD performance metrics into direct business value. You’ll learn how to calculate the cost of slow builds, quantify the value of faster recovery times, measure the financial impact of improved success rates, and demonstrate the ROI of developer productivity gains. Whether you’re building a business case for CI/CD investment or optimizing your existing infrastructure, these formulas will help you translate technical metrics into the language of business impact.
The four metrics that matter
Before we dive into the numbers, let me be clear: This isn’t about tools – it’s about business outcomes. When we talk about CI/CD metrics like duration, throughput, recovery time, and success rate, we’re really talking about your ability to innovate faster than your competition.
Scale amplifies both the challenges and opportunities in CI/CD optimization. At CircleCI, we see customers running upwards of 10,000 workflows per day. At this volume, every second of improvement or degradation is multiplied thousands of times over. A seemingly small improvement in build time or recovery speed unlocks thousands of hours of additional engineering time over the course of a year. Whether you’re a rapidly growing startup or an established enterprise, these compounding effects make CI/CD performance a critical lever for engineering productivity.
While these metrics and their business impact are universal, achieving meaningful improvements in them requires the right foundation. CircleCI is built to help you optimize these metrics and capture their full business value. Let me show you exactly how these metrics translate to your bottom line.
1. Duration: The silent productivity killer
Every minute your developers spend waiting for builds and tests is a minute they’re not innovating. It’s death by a thousand cuts – those small delays compound across your entire engineering organization. Here’s how to quantify it:
Developer Downtime Cost =
(Current avg workflow duration - Target workflow duration)
× Daily pipeline runs
× Developer cost per minute
x Working days per year
Let’s put some real numbers to this. For a mid-sized team running 1500 pipelines daily and an average developer cost of $1/minute:
- Current build duration: 15 minutes
- Target build duration: 7 minutes
- Working days: 250
Annual savings = (15 - 7) × 1500 × $1 × 250 = $3M
That’s $3 million in recovered engineering time from an 8-minute improvement in build time. This isn’t theoretical – we see savings like this regularly with organizations who modernize their CI/CD infrastructure. A large financial services customer, for example, cut their workflow run time by 27% in 2024, saving $2.3 million in engineering productivity on a single project.
2. Mean time to recovery: The innovation blocker
When a critical build process fails, every minute counts. But the real cost isn’t just in the immediate fix – it’s in the downstream impact on your entire delivery pipeline. Developers busy fixing bugs are pulled away from building new features, stifling innovation across your organization.
Here’s how to measure the innovation time you reclaim by improving your mean time to recovery (MTTR):
Innovation Time Reclaimed =
(Current MTTR - Target MTTR)
× (Failure rate × Daily throughput)
× Working days
/ 60 mins per hour
Using typical enterprise numbers:
- Current MTTR: 90 minutes
- Target MTTR: 60 minutes
- Failure rate: 10%
- Daily runs: 1,500
Annual innovation hours reclaimed = (90 - 60) × (0.10 × 1500) × 250 / 60 = 18,750 hours
In other words, shortening recovery times by 30 minutes adds the equivalent of 9 full-time engineers ($1 million in annual value) to your team’s innovation capacity. Those 18,750 reclaimed hours can now be spent building new features, refining user experiences, and pushing your product forward rather than firefighting issues.
3. Throughput: The delivery bottleneck
The real power of improved CI/CD comes from its multiplicative effect on developer productivity. This typically shows up in higher rates of throughput, suggesting faster delivery of features, more frequent releases, and the ability to respond quickly to customer feedback or market demands. Over time, this compounding efficiency can dramatically accelerate innovation cycles and improve overall business agility.
Here’s how to measure the true productivity impact of CI/CD optimization on a per developer basis:
Productivity Change =
(Target throughput / Target dev count) - (Current throughput / current dev count)
/ (Current throughput / Current dev count)
This formula accounts for headcount changes by normalizing both the current and target states to a per-developer basis, eliminating the distorting effect of team size changes. This allows for a true comparison of individual developer productivity even if the team grows or shrinks between measurement periods.
CircleCI customers often see a minimum 10-20% improvement in per-developer productivity after implementing a robust and optimized CI/CD pipeline. For a team of 200 developers, that’s like instantly adding 20-40 full-time engineers (between $2.4M and $4.8M in value) to your workforce, without the extensive recruiting cycles, onboarding time, or staffing costs. Give your developers the tools they need to be their most productive, and you will dramatically accelerate your ability to innovate and capture market opportunities that would otherwise remain out of reach.
4. Success rate: The hidden cost multiplier
Failed builds aren’t just frustrating – they’re expensive. Every time a workflow fails, it needs to be rerun, consuming both computational resources and developer time. While individual failures might seem insignificant, at enterprise scale, even small improvements in success rate can translate to substantial cost savings and improved developer experience.
Here’s how to calculate the direct cost savings from improving your workflow success rate:
Cost Savings =
([1 - current success rate] - [1 - target success rate])
× Daily throughput
× Average cost per build
× Working days per year
Let’s break this down with real numbers for an enterprise team, assuming each build consumes approximately 1,667 credits (equivalent to $1 in CI/CD costs).
- Current success rate: 70%
- Target success rate: 90%
- Daily throughput: 1,500 builds
- Cost per build: $1
- Working days: 250
Annual savings = (0.30 - 0.10) × 1500 × $1 × 250 = $75,000
That’s $75,000 in direct infrastructure costs saved annually just by improving success rates. But the real impact goes beyond pure infrastructure savings – failed builds create context switching costs for developers, delay feature delivery or critical updates, and impact team morale. When combined with the productivity impact of fewer interruptions and more reliable deployments, the total business value of improved success rates can be 3-4x higher than the direct cost savings (equivalent to $300k value in this scenario).
The compound effect
The power of these improvements compounds. When you reduce build times, developers run more tests, improving product quality. When you improve recovery time, teams deploy more frequently, getting more features into customers’ hands. When you increase throughput, innovation accelerates. It’s a virtuous cycle that creates a widening competitive advantage.
Let’s look at the combined impact using conservative numbers:
- $3M recovered from faster build times
- $1M value from reclaimed innovation time
- $2.5M equivalent value from productivity improvements
- $300,000 value from increased success rates
- Total Annual Impact: $6.8M
Beyond the numbers
While these formulas help quantify the direct financial impact, they don’t capture the full strategic value of best-in-class CI/CD:
- Faster time-to-market for new features
- Improved developer satisfaction and retention
- Reduced operational risk
- Better security posture through more frequent updates
- Increased visibility into team performance and product health
- Tighter collaboration and knowledge sharing
- Happier customers
The question isn’t whether you should invest in CI/CD — it’s whether you can afford not to. Every day you operate with suboptimal delivery infrastructure, you’re leaving millions in engineering productivity on the table and falling behind competitors who have optimized their delivery pipeline.
Taking Action
With a clear understanding of how software delivery performance improvements translate to business value, the opportunity cost of delay becomes obvious. The good news is that capturing this value doesn’t require a massive transformation – it starts with five straightforward steps:
- Benchmark your current metrics against CircleCI’s industry insights data
- Calculate your potential savings using these formulas
- Schedule a consultation with our solutions architects to map out your optimization strategy
- Start with a proof of concept to validate the ROI
- Scale your success with a dedicated customer success team
The path to quantifiable ROI from CI/CD investment is clear, and CircleCI is purpose-built to help you capture it. With our enterprise-grade scale, world-class support, and proven track record of customer success, we can help you achieve these improvements faster than you might think possible.