No problem, hope it's useful :). You're right about deploy frequency - that 10-20 minute manual deploy done 3-6x a day already adds up to my 4 hours a week deploying things. 10% of the work week right there!
On the other end of the spectrum, a lot of my personal projects don't warrant even the small effort of configuring an existing build server. I'm the only contributor, nobody else will be breaking anything or blocking me, builds are super fast... even if "it will pay off in the long run", there are other higher impact things I could do that will pay off even better in the long run.
In the middle, I've put off automating some build stuff for our occasional (~monthly) "package" builds for our publisher - especially the brittle, easy to fix by hand, rightly suspected to be hard to automate stuff. I was generally asked to summarize VCS history for QA/PMs anyways - can't automate that.
When we started doing daily package builds near a release, however, it ate up enough of my time that non-technical management actually noticed and prodded me before I thought to prod them. Started by offloading my checklist to our internal QA (an interesting alternative to fully automating things) and eventually automated all the parts QA would forget, not know how to handle, or waste too much attention on.
Even then, some steps remained manual - e.g. uploading to our publisher's FTP server. Tended to run out of quota, occasionally full despite having quota available, sometimes unreachable, or uploading too slow thanks to internet issues - at which point someone would have to transfer by sneakernet instead anyways. Not much of a point trying to make the CI server handle all that.
On the other end of the spectrum, a lot of my personal projects don't warrant even the small effort of configuring an existing build server. I'm the only contributor, nobody else will be breaking anything or blocking me, builds are super fast... even if "it will pay off in the long run", there are other higher impact things I could do that will pay off even better in the long run.
In the middle, I've put off automating some build stuff for our occasional (~monthly) "package" builds for our publisher - especially the brittle, easy to fix by hand, rightly suspected to be hard to automate stuff. I was generally asked to summarize VCS history for QA/PMs anyways - can't automate that.
When we started doing daily package builds near a release, however, it ate up enough of my time that non-technical management actually noticed and prodded me before I thought to prod them. Started by offloading my checklist to our internal QA (an interesting alternative to fully automating things) and eventually automated all the parts QA would forget, not know how to handle, or waste too much attention on.
Even then, some steps remained manual - e.g. uploading to our publisher's FTP server. Tended to run out of quota, occasionally full despite having quota available, sometimes unreachable, or uploading too slow thanks to internet issues - at which point someone would have to transfer by sneakernet instead anyways. Not much of a point trying to make the CI server handle all that.