How Slower Releases May Be Costing You More Than You Think

Software release cycles influence the rate of innovations, security updates, and operational efficiency. Many organizations appreciate the benefits of continuous delivery, but often do not realize the full cost of delayed releases. Besides missing market opportunities, each slow deploy introduces a range of compounding inefficiencies that will impact engineering efficiency, operational stability, and long-term system viability.

Greater Engineering Overhead

When releases are slow, it increases the number of variables that overlay on the development workflow. For example, engineers who are working on long-lived feature branches must constantly “rebase” their branch with the changes that are taking place on the constantly changing main branch. This creates merge conflict risks, regression failures, and large code diffs that make isolating bugs much harder and take longer debugging cycles. When releases are infrequent, teams also accumulate more changes for each deployment, thereby increasing the difficulty of identifying a root cause failure.

Adding to the engineering management, a slow-release process will create more manual work. Engineers will in the future need to spend additional time comparing their code against the pre-release testing, in addition to increasing the length and detail needed for code reviews, and depending on the size of the release, impact monitoring could take longer as well. These activities pull resources away from improving features and/or paying down technical debt.

Increased Security Exposure

Issues with security vulnerabilities are always made more complex by requiring immediate action to remediate. However, a slow release process creates challenges related to deploying fixes in a timely way. If an organization cannot deploy or release fixes quickly, it has possibly provided attackers with more time to compromise its systems. Zero-day attacks require immediate action, and while it is easy to suggest to a technical team that they need to take immediate action, the reality for many organizations’ last line of defense is in their approach to incident management. Generally, this means that practitioners have limited incident management pathways to choose from to remediate quickly, forcing the organization to build in temporary manual process workarounds. This situation can create additional security risk entry points, enabling further attacks from the same originator. Aside from vulnerability patching, slowed release cycles create excessive friction in maintaining dependency updates. While security advisories may recommend that teams upgrade third-party libraries, teams unable to apply those updates slowly increase their exposure to known exploits due to a slow release cycle.

Decreased System Stability

Fast release cycles enable the continual incremental change of minor and/or major updates to be monitored, providing shorter feedback loop periods between changes. So when changes in the environment are implemented slower than one user fixing a bug, the operational teams will bundle up a series of changes to go live, increasing the risk of outages and increased degradation.

When releases happen infrequently, the operational teams release a larger change to production with a higher chance that unforeseen side effects occur between services, so monitoring and rollbacks become increasingly burdensome, making in safety mechanisms becomes much harder to mitigate service interruption, as the time to recovery from failure increases, service availability and reliability decrease.

Increased Operational Cost

Delayed releases equal a direct increase in operational costs. With respect to infrastructure costs, teams are running staging environments longer for testing, there are longer testing cycles, and possibly one or two staging environments to rehearse deploying every time before going to production. Not to mention inefficient use of resources, charging per hour while holding on to environments longer than necessary.

Looking at delayed releases from the lens of change management, it typically takes longer with slow releases when coordination is needed to deploy things, which means personnel costs naturally increase with every second spent getting the release ready without actually being able to charge any projects for their efforts. The moment teams begin spending more time coordinating releases and validating releases compared to the value they delivered, it works to their benefit, the bottom line in the form of higher personnel costs.

Loss of Competitive Advantage

Slow release cycles make it more difficult for organizations to keep up with customer demands and industry changes. In comparison, organizations with rapid iteration cycles will be able to incrementally provide additional features, security enhancements, and performance upgrades quickly than their competitors can react to the changes. Rapid iteration teams capture customer demand quickly, which leaves organizations with slow release cycles unable to keep up with the user demands that can only be captured during a match with a competitor.

Slow feature rollout is also detrimental to the level of trust from customers. Customers experience a period of time when they need something progressed quickly, either a feature request or a software bug needs to be fixed. Customers expect a quick release going to software 4.0, so when the software is dragging with updates, they will be happy to move their problems elsewhere.

Conclusion

We have established that delayed releases cost more than being late by understanding the engineering inefficiencies, security vulnerabilities, and other issues, such as not establishing a common release cadence to maintain system stability and availability, increasing operational costs, and ultimately, the inability to remain competitive in the industry. An optimized release cadence means more than encouraging speedy releases; it means enhancing our software delivery practices to enable departments to leverage increased system resiliency, reliability, and efficiency.

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