Currently, our organization does not practice Continuous Integration.
In order for us to get an CI server up and running, I will need to produce a document demonstrating the return on the investment.
Aside from cost savings by finding and fixing bugs early, I’m curious about other benefits/savings that I could stick into this document.
My #1 reason for liking CI is that it helps prevent developers from checking in broken code which can sometimes cripple an entire team. Imagine if I make a significant check-in involving some db schema changes right before I leave for vacation. Sure, everything works fine on my dev box, but I forget to check-in the db schema changescript which may or may not be trivial. Well, now there are complex changes referring to new/changed fields in the database but nobody who is in the office the next day actually has that new schema, so now the entire team is down while somebody looks into reproducing the work you already did and just forgot to check in.
And yes, I used a particularly nasty example with db changes but it could be anything, really. Perhaps a partial check-in with some emailing code that then causes all of your devs to spam your actual end-users? You name it…
So in my opinion, avoiding a single one of these situations will make the ROI of such an endeavor pay off VERY quickly.