[gsavit]

We started with some napkin math, graduated to a complicated spreadsheet, and then tried to distill that into this rough calculator: https://runway.team/release-cost-calculator. General idea was to capture the cost of wasted time spent coordinating and herding cats instead of doing real work! We think there are even more hidden costs not captured here though - e.g. upkeep for in-house tooling or effort spent onboarding new team members.

[mitko]

Seems about right ballpark, if not undercounting it.

My team doesn't releases a mobile client but we release desktop client / chrome extensions every week. It takes about a day of work for an engineer to go through the builds, QA, prepare notes, check the status of things in flight that are trying to land in there, fix some related bugs and so on. And that is with a lot of automation we have. It is also a big distraction from other work, so the opportunity cost is quite high too.