How Priceline capitalizes software 5x faster using Jellyfish DevFinOps

Advancing software capitalization processes 

Priceline is known throughout the world for helping travelers find the best rates for airfare, hotel stays, rental cars, cruises and vacation packages. The company operates in more than 116 countries, allowing customers to sort through discounted offers and book their travel plans through Priceline. This global online travel agency requires serious engineering resources: the company employs more than 700 employees across dozens of teams. The scope of Priceline’s engineering team means that tasks like software capitalization — categorizing software development costs for accounting purposes — can be extremely complicated.

Traditionally, enterprises relied on their employees to self-report on how much of their software development work could be capitalized. Time spent working on new features can be capitalized as a research and development expense; time spent fixing existing products and code cannot. Even in small organizations, this manual approach to cost capitalization can be complicated and time-consuming. But for an organization with hundreds of engineers, it’s overwhelming.

“As our technology organization continued to grow, the software capitalization process became unsustainable to manage, sometimes taking a full week to complete,” said Tony Padovano, Program Management Fellow at Priceline. “We outgrew self-reporting and needed a more efficient solution for our engineers. Implementing Jellyfish allowed us to significantly reduce the workload and create a more sustainable process.”

Priceline understood the need to automate their software capitalization process, and they began using Jellyfish DevFinOps with the goal of reaching the same result in a fraction of the time. 

Building new habits with data hygiene

Automating Priceline’s approach to software capitalization required an organization-wide shift in the way they recorded and organized data. Jellyfish DevFinOps allows organizations to move from a qualitative approach — in which engineers record their time retroactively — to a quantitative approach linking GitHub and Jira. Once employees understand the new system, they can easily mark whether work is capitalizable or not at the epic level.

Padovano recognized the need for consistency. Priceline was able to automate the link between GitHub and Jira in many cases, but other pipelines required engineers to link the work manually. Priceline’s engineering leadership stressed the importance of consistency when recording capitalizable work, offering frequent reminders to engineers about the new approach.

As Priceline teams improved their data hygiene metrics, Padovano encouraged engineering managers to look at hygiene metrics during one-to-one conversations, helping individual employees to make corrections. 

Cross-functional communication and confidence

Priceline’s transition to DevFinOps also required Padovano to build trust with the finance organization. In order to demonstrate the value of Jellyfish, Padovano ran two systems for software capitalization in parallel for three months: the old, manual approach to time tracking; and the new approach automated by Jellyfish. By the end of that experiment, Padovano was able to demonstrate to his colleagues in finance that the new system was both more efficient and delivered more accurate results.

This emphasis on objective, quantitative data has allowed Padovano to build support across the organization. Both Priceline’s CTO and CFO now rely on information from Jellyfish, demonstrating the cross-functional value of reliable engineering data.

According to Padovano, the key to success is frequent communication.

Faster audits and increased financial clarity

After improving the organization’s data hygiene and achieving organizational buy-in, Priceline is now enjoying the improved speed and accuracy offered by DevFinOps. Automated software capitalization proved particularly valuable as the company works with internal auditors on several projects, substantially reducing the internal resource interview process by more than 80%. 

Above all, Priceline has reached a new level of financial clarity when it comes to their engineering work. “With Jellyfish DevFinOps, we’re now able to better track the investments made building a product,” said Padovano. “The additional clarity is helpful for both project management and future forecasting as we plan resource allocation.”