The Productivity Math Behind GitHub Enterprise

Development teams wrestling with fragmented toolchains face a familiar set of problems: lengthy onboarding, constant context switching, security flaws discovered late in the delivery cycle, and the overhead of maintaining legacy infrastructure. Canadian telecom provider TELUS ran into all of these issues before consolidating on GitHub Enterprise as its single platform for end-to-end software development. The results after the move: new developers are onboarded in minutes, each developer saves two hours per week, and every GitHub Actions run saves one minute compared with the previous workflow.

To quantify these kinds of gains more broadly, GitHub commissioned a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study from Forrester Consulting. Forrester interviewed and surveyed organizations using GitHub Enterprise Cloud (GHEC) and GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS), then aggregated the findings into a composite enterprise. Over a three-year analysis period, the study reported a 433% return on investment from using the GitHub platform.

Speed and Efficiency Gains

Developer productivity is notoriously hard to define, let alone measure. But the Forrester study points to concrete, quantifiable improvements once teams moved off their legacy stacks onto GHEC and GHAS:

  • Developer productivity gains of 22%
  • Tool maintenance productivity gains of 75%, achieved by phasing out legacy tools

Before the switch, organizations were writing homegrown solutions to bridge gaps between open source tools, and security flaws often surfaced only late in the SDLC — or after code had already reached production. The decentralized management of legacy tools further dragged on team output. Consolidating on GitHub's platform reduced those interruptions and let developers push code to production faster.

Security and Compliance Benefits

Without automation in the CI/CD environment, software defects and vulnerabilities traveled deep into the development lifecycle before anyone caught them. DevOps and DevSecOps teams burned significant time writing custom code to detect issues across disparate platforms. Audit compliance was equally labor-intensive: full-time teams of auditors had to gather documentation and run internal and external reviews across decentralized environments.

After implementing GHEC, GHAS, GitHub Pages, GitHub Actions, and Codespaces, the composite organization saw these security-related gains over three years:

  • $2.7 million USD in IT auditor time saved preparing for audits
  • 15% improvement in DevOps, DevSecOps, and site reliability engineer efficiency
  • $5.2 million USD saved from reduced time spent on code remediation

The result is fewer vulnerabilities in production code and more granular control over security policies, which matters for organizations defending against both internal and external threats.

Faster Onboarding, Better Retention

The first days and weeks of a new developer's tenure frequently determine whether they can make an immediate impact. The composite organization's pre-GitHub onboarding process stretched to 10 days—time largely spent learning the organization's bespoke tooling rather than the organization's actual codebase. After implementing GitHub, organizations cut training time for new developers by 80%.

There's a talent angle here as well. Developers tend to prefer working with tools they already know, and GitHub's platform covers the full development lifecycle. That makes tenured developers happier with their environment and lets newcomers contribute from their first week on the job.

Hardware and Infrastructure Savings

The study also examined the cost side of the equation. Maintaining legacy tools and their supporting infrastructure carried recurring annual expenses in hardware, software, and labor. By standardizing development on GHEC and using GHAS and GitHub Actions to centralize formerly distributed tasks, organizations were able to retire many legacy servers. Over three years, the composite organization realized $811,900 USD in total cost of ownership savings.

The full Forrester TEI study—including the composite organization's detailed assumptions and methodology—is available for download from GitHub's resources site.

The composite organization used for the study is an enterprise with 120,000 employees and 7,000 developers, growing at 500 per year. It uses GHEC, GHAS, GitHub Actions, Codespaces, GitHub Discussions, and GitHub Pages, and was testing GitHub Copilot. The development team manages 20,000 code repositories and $100,000 in legacy hardware, and had used GitHub for five years.