TeamCity
Powerful CI/CD for DevOps-centric teams
The ROI of Developer Experience: How a Better CI/CD Tool Pays for Itself
This article was brought to you by Cameron Pavey, draft.dev.
Developer experience (DevEx) directly correlates with engineering performance, which in turn drives competitive advantage.
And yet many software engineering teams continue to operate on legacy CI/CD platforms that create unnecessary friction, burn developer hours, and ultimately limit business growth.
While some teams remain trapped by outdated infrastructure, others benefit from modern toolchains that drive measurable performance improvements. Organizations that use performant CI/CD platforms achieve deployment frequencies that are measured in hours rather than weeks, lead times shortened by orders of magnitude, and change failure rates that preserve both customer trust and developer confidence.
This article explains why partial and incremental fixes to legacy systems consistently fail and how modern, developer-centric platforms like TeamCity reclaim developer productivity and deliver a measurable return on investment (ROI).
The drag of legacy CI/CD on business performance
Legacy CI/CD platforms, such as aging installations of the once-ubiquitous Jenkins, and fragmented toolchains create systematic inefficiencies that compound across every aspect of software delivery. These systems weren’t designed for the velocity and complexity that modern development demands.
Yet organizations continue operating them, often falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy, where past investments in these platforms feel too significant to abandon despite the ongoing toll on efficiency and developer productivity.
Fragmented CI/CD environments require significant engineering attention that could otherwise focus on product development. A typical legacy setup might involve Jenkins for builds, separate tools for testing, manual deployment orchestration, and disconnected monitoring systems. Each extra tool and integration introduces potential points of failure and requires specialized knowledge to maintain.
Consider the developer experience: A single pipeline failure can require understanding YAML syntax, shell scripting, plugin compatibility, and infrastructure state. Developers spend hours debugging build environments instead of shipping features. Engineering teams report as much as 20 percent of weekly time lost to inefficiencies, technical debt, maintenance, and tooling issues rather than product work.
This productivity drain can be quantified. The DORA research exposes exactly how legacy platforms hinder performance. Organizations using outdated CI/CD typically demonstrate:
- Deployment frequency: monthly or quarterly releases instead of multiple daily deployments
- Lead time for changes: weeks from commit to production instead of hours
- Change failure rate: 15–45 percent, while elite performers are at 0–15 percent
- Mean time to recovery: hours or days instead of less than one hour
These metrics represent opportunity costs. Where elite-performing teams iterate rapidly and respond to market changes within hours, teams constrained by legacy systems operate at fundamentally different competitive speeds and cannot leverage the same opportunities.
Performance limitations also have organizational consequences that affect talent retention and operational stability. Talented engineers leave organizations where they spend more time fighting infrastructure than building products. Surveys show that inadequate tools and inefficient CI/CD processes rank among the top factors in turnover decisions for developers.
Additionally, pipeline fragility creates operational risk. Legacy systems often require manual intervention during critical deployments, which increases the likelihood of human error during critical releases. The resulting incidents consume engineering attention, erode customer trust, and require expensive postmortem processes.
Many organizations that recognize these problems make incremental improvements in an attempt to modernize their legacy CI/CD setup. They add new plugins to Jenkins, implement additional monitoring tools, or create wrapper scripts to reduce complexity.
However, incremental approaches fail to address the fundamental architectural limitations that hinder performance.
In fact, partial fixes usually create additional complexity rather than reducing it. New tools introduce additional integration points, require separate maintenance overhead, and create inconsistent developer experiences across different projects.
Heavily customized legacy systems often become even more difficult to operate than standard configurations.
The ROI of DevEx: How TeamCity delivers measurable returns
Modern, integrated CI/CD platforms like TeamCity enable elite performance through features specifically designed for developer productivity and operational reliability.
Elite teams using integrated platforms deploy 208 times more frequently than others, reduce lead times from months to days, and cut recovery times from weeks to just hours. These improvements result in reclaimed developer productivity, accelerated feature delivery, and reduced operational risk.
Let’s examine the specific capabilities that drive these returns:
Intuitive UI and build-chain visualization
TeamCity’s visual build-chain interface eliminates the cognitive overhead associated with complex YAML configurations and fragmented toolchains. Developers can understand pipeline dependencies, identify bottlenecks, and troubleshoot issues without specialized configuration knowledge.
Developer benefit: New team members become productive in hours rather than weeks. Experienced developers spend time building features instead of deciphering pipeline syntax. Surveys suggest that developers can reclaim up to a day per week when toolchain and process inefficiencies are reduced.
Business ROI: Higher engineer productivity translates to more features shipped per sprint and lower effective staffing costs per project. Let’s say you have a team of ten developers, each earning around $100K. Saving three hours per week could mean $75,000+ annually in reclaimed productivity.
Deep SCM and VCS integration
TeamCity provides easy integration with modern version control systems, automatically triggering builds based on commit patterns and providing contextual information about changes. This eliminates manual build triggers and reduces the errors associated with disconnected systems.
Developer benefit: Developers commit code and immediately receive build feedback without manual intervention. Contextual commit information enables faster debugging when issues occur. Teams eliminate the fifteen to thirty minutes typically required for manual build coordination, as well as the overhead of switching contexts.
Business ROI: Accelerated feedback cycles enable faster iteration and reduce the compound costs of late-discovered defects. Faster feedback loops, better automation, and more reliable pipelines substantially improve cycle time, which allows organizations to ship revenue-generating features faster, reduce time-to-market for new products, and increase the frequency of customer-facing improvements.
Advanced test intelligence
The developer experience of your CI platform directly determines how readily your team will adopt and maintain comprehensive test automation. TeamCity’s advanced testing capabilities – like predictive test selection, flaky test detection, and historical test analytics – remove friction from the testing workflow and make robust quality gates practical rather than aspirational.
Developer benefit: Fast, reliable test feedback enables developers to confidently execute code changes. Flaky tests no longer interrupt development flow or create false-positive alerts. Intelligent parallelization decreases test execution time by as much as 40–60 percent. And because the test parallelization is dynamic, the speed benefits can scale as new tests are added without drastically increasing run times.
Business ROI: Better automated quality control reduces defect escape costs and lowers incidents that impact customers.
Real-time monitoring and extensible plugins
TeamCity provides unified visibility across builds, tests, security scans, and infrastructure status through a single interface. The extensive plugin ecosystem enables teams to integrate with existing tools while maintaining consistent monitoring and alerting.
Developer benefit: Unified insight eliminates the context switching required to understand system state across multiple tools. Developers identify and resolve issues faster through consolidated monitoring. Custom plugins enable adaptation to evolve technology stacks without platform migration.
Business ROI: With fragmented toolchains, engineering teams spend substantial time configuring, maintaining, and monitoring disparate plugins and integrations, spending effort that delivers no direct customer value. TeamCity’s unified monitoring approach reduces this operational overhead so that engineers can focus on feature development rather than pipeline maintenance.
Scalable, performance-tuned architecture
TeamCity Cloud’s architecture scales efficiently as organizations grow, maintaining build performance even as project complexity increases. This eliminates the need for frequent replatforming and provides predictable operational costs. Because TeamCity Cloud’s infrastructure is managed for you, you also don’t need to worry about runners becoming outdated or aging out of usefulness as your application grows in complexity.
Developer benefit: Build times remain consistent as projects grow. Developers avoid the productivity hits associated with infrastructure capacity constraints. Teams can focus on feature development rather than infrastructure scaling decisions.
Business ROI: Deferred infrastructure spending and predictable operational expenses enable better budget planning. Organizations avoid the disruption and costs associated with emergency platform migrations when existing systems reach capacity limits.
In summary
Elite-performing teams operate at fundamentally different speeds than their competitors, enabling them to respond to market opportunities, recover from incidents, and iterate on customer feedback rapidly.
Upgrading to a developer-centric CI/CD platform like TeamCity is an investment with clear returns: reclaimed developer productivity, accelerated feature delivery, reduced operational risk, and improved customer satisfaction. Some organizations report payback in mere months when automation and tooling investments eliminate inefficiencies and reduce cycle times, though results depend on your organization’s scale and context.
The real risk lies in inaction.
While competitors migrate to modern platforms and achieve elite performance levels, organizations that maintain legacy systems fall further behind in capability and competitive position. The performance gap between elite and low-performing organizations continues to widen as modern platforms enable increasingly sophisticated development practices.
If your legacy tooling is holding your teams back and hampering performance, it might be time to make a change.
Subscribe to TeamCity Blog updates
