Calculate the hard cost of your un-merged pull requests

We were just onsite with Kieran Lal, Senior Director of API Design products at Mulesoft. He said to us:

What a great way to describe the cost of low deployment velocity in a way that resonates with product leaders, and not just engineering leaders.

Want to calculate that cost at your company? Here’s how:

To calculate hard costs using man-hours: (# of open PRs [1]) x (man-hours of engineering time required for each PR) x (avg. eng. employee hourly rate)

To calculate hard costs using JIRA story points: (# of open PRs [1]) x (story points for each PR) x (avg. eng. dollar cost per story point)

To calculate opportunity & innovation costs to the business:

1. Figure out how much revenue each employee at your company is responsible for driving. For example, if your company makes $1Bn in annual revenue, and it has 2,000 employees, then each employee is responsible for contributing $500,000 in revenue to the business — but only if their work is getting out the door!
2. Assuming each employee works 2,000 hours per year, that would mean that each employee’s hourly revenue contribution is $250.
3. Then calculate (# of open PRs [1]) x (man hours of engineering time required for each PR) x (revenue contribution/hr -- i.e., $250).

[1] Here’s the actual query you can run in your Github repo(s) to find the number of un-merged PRs: org:[your-org-name] is:open is:pr is:private

These numbers will add up quickly and show the true cost of low deployment velocity. Luckily, Armory is here to help. Our entire mission is to accelerate deployment velocity through automation and safety. Your developers’ code should be flowing continuously, and safely, to production, without being held up in a virtualized inventory state.

Learn More:

• More details on what Spinnaker is and how it works
• How Spinnaker enables global Software Delivery Best-Practices
• How to succeed with Spinnaker: Armory’s Spinnaker Adoption Playbook
• Armory Spinnaker training & reference materials
• Armory’s User Guide and Administrative Documentation
• Want to try it yourself? Install Armory Spinnaker here
• Armory’s enterprise pricing
• Want to join us? We’re hiring polyglot engineers. Get a peek under the hood at Armory.

How Companies Go Digital: We highly recommend O’Reilly’s free PDF e-Book about migrating toward cloud-native technologies and practices by shifting from monolithic onsite architectures to applications designed solely to operate on cloud computing platforms. Get the highlights here.