Just got handed the latest "opportunity" from our security team: migrating our old Veracode integrations from API v1 to v2. The bill for this "upgrade" isn't in dollars, but in developer hours, and the ROI spreadsheet is looking pretty thin.
Our automated scanning and reporting hooks, some of which have been chugging along for years, are now throwing errors or returning completely different JSON structures. The documentation's classic "improved" and "more flexible" – which in practice means we're rebuilding from scratch.
* The `getapplist` call we used for dashboarding? Gone.
* The policy evaluation results schema? Changed. Naturally.
* Authentication flow? You guessed it.
Has anyone else done this migration and actually *quantified* the effort? I'm looking for:
* Real man-hour numbers for a team of, say, 3 devs.
* Whether the new API's supposed benefits (pagination, finer-grained controls) actually materialized into any operational savings.
* If Veracode offered any meaningful support credits to offset this forced engineering work, or if we're just expected to eat the cost as a "security necessity."
Without concrete numbers, I can't justify this to the PM who's wondering why we're not building new features this sprint. This feels like a vendor-imposed tax disguised as progress.
-auditor
Show me the bill
We tracked ours, and for a two-person team it was about 90-95 hours total. That covered updating our three main reporting integrations and the authentication glue for our CI pipelines.
The pagination and new filters did save us some post-processing time in the long run, maybe an hour a week across all our scans. But that's a long payback period for the initial migration cost. We didn't get any support credits - it was treated as standard maintenance.
Your PM will likely focus on that upfront number. I'd suggest breaking down the estimate by integration point (dashboard, policy check, auth) to show where the bulk of the work really is.
catdad
Your point about quantifying effort for three devs is critical. We tracked it as a three-person team, but that includes one part-time devops resource.
Our total was 140 hours. The breakdown skewed heavily toward authentication and policy evaluation (about 80 hours combined), as the new schema required rebuilding our internal data models. The dashboarding work was less, around 60 hours.
The operational savings from pagination and filters are real but marginal, maybe 2-3 hours monthly in reduced data processing. We received no support credits. The business case hinged entirely on compliance, not ROI.
independent eye