What are some methods to measure the ROI for DevOps?
Great question! Most of us know investing in DevOps practices is a highly worthwhile pursuit for myriad reasons; we don't often justify DevOps on the impact to the bottom line alone, though.

Note: this is something of an opinionated question, and my answer is likewise, opinionated.

Tensibai wisely suggested we find the right metrics, and he used time-to-market as an example. This is a great big-picture approach.

As an alternative approach, my experience with bean-counters is that they don't need to--or necessarily want to--know the big-picture, they just want evidence of fiscal responsibility. They want to see a trend in the right direction.

Here are just a few fiscal wins:


calculate the server costs saved by leveraging auto-scaling in the cloud
for income-generating sites, extrapolate the cost-per-minute of downtime, then show improvements in MTTI and MTTR
again, for income-generating sites, estimate the cost-per-minute saved by leveraging highly-available architecture based on past incidents
if you've improved on your build and deploy pipeline, show that you've reduced regressions and errors in production caused by already-tracked faults
if you've made improvements to developer test environments, or even the tools and configuration on developer laptops, look at commit histories to see if new engineers are making their first contributions sooner after joining
perform a full cost comparison between cloud and on-prem, much like Gitlab did recently, to justify your infrastructure spending (a.k.a. savings!)


Showing that you're money-conscious and you have a few clear wins is often sufficient. I've certainly missed some obvious examples; feel free to add comments below.