CI/CD in numbers

This article tries to explain why CI/CD is a competitive advantage for your company.

Opportunity costs

It represents the benefits an individual, investor or business misses out on when choosing one alternative over another. While financial reports do not show opportunity cost, business owners can use it to make educated decisions when they have multiple options before them. Bottlenecks are often a cause of opportunity costs.

In a normal company the opportunity cost is calculated using market studies but these studies are very expensive (we have to identify our clients, make survey about our new product, etc). We cannot do this for each feature we want to develop because the time to market would not support it. So usually we reduce these decisions to what competitors are doing, which client segments are more interesting for us, our knowledge of the business, etc.

We know also that Pareto’s rule applies to our features usage, 80% of users only use 20% of features. This came out of research from the Standish Group back in 2002, where they found that:

• 45% of features were never used;
• 19% used rarely;
• 16% sometimes;
• only 20% were used frequently or always.

So in general we are not taking the best decisions when investing in the features of our system. A/B testing is a way of taking better decisions about the features we are providing to our clients.