Creating The Conditions For An Awesome Developer Experience Hibri Marzook • Software Practice Lead

2 Hibri Marzook Software Practice Lead Help teams deliver fast and enjoy doing it @hibri www.hibri.net

3 Prod Env Non - Prod Env GIT Cloud Provider Portal Developer Feedback Seconds - Minutes Feedback Loop is Broken Hours - Days Wall of Confusion Ops Raise a ticket The Wall of Confusion

Can’t use existing knowledge Focus is lost Helplessness

Impact of a poor DevEx Cochran, T. (2021)

High-friction and low effective environments create the conditions for burn-out

What is DevEx? Developer Experience is about creating an environment in which a developer can do their best work.

How do developers feel about the processes, systems and services they use?

The work we do should not cause negative emotions

A good DevEx reduces Cognitive Load Intrinsic - the task at hand Germane - How do I solve x? Extraneous - How do I deploy FooBar again?

Why is DevEx important? Developer productivity underpins the success of your organisation.

Srivasta, S. et al. (2020)

Hire expensive developers Make it hard to do their jobs . . . Profit?

What does good DevEx look like? Heroku - do everything via the CLI and Git Monzo - CLI tools for devs to deploy, test and interact with services Netflix - evolving standard build tooling to developer tooling

DevEx is contextual Developers exist in an environment that is unique to your organisation and environment ?

A good developer experience is emergent

Create boundaries for risk and responsibility

No content

Good fences make good neighbours

Give Autonomy within boundaries

Create a shared responsibility model

Example of a Boundary : Pipeline as a Product ● A versioned library of pipeline steps ● Opinionated Pipeline ● Evolve pipeline with Governance needs

Create Team Interactions for Fast Flow

Conway’s Law 24 “Organisations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organisations”

Conway’s Law affects the developer experience 25

Understand Team Interactions

Adopt an Internal OSS Model

Platform/Dev Tooling code is visible to everyone

Anyone can send a PR, to improve developer tooling

No content

An internal OSS model removes barriers to collaboration

Create Fast Feedback Loops

The Simplest Feedback Loop is a Conversation 33

Optimize Feedback Loops, Not Pipelines 34

Get to Real Users Quicker. Only Prod Matters 35 https://twitter.com/copyconstruct/status/974530841190608897

How do we measure DevEx?

The SPACE Framework S - Satisfaction and Well-being P - Performance A - Activity C - Communication and Collaboration E - Efficiency and flow (Forsgren et al., 2021)

Dispelling Developer Productivity Myths ● Productivity is only about individual performance ● One productivity metric can tell us everything ● Productivity is only about engineering systems and developer tools ● Productivity is all about developer activity

The most important takeaway from exposing these myths is that productivity cannot be reduced to a single dimension (or metric!) (Forsgren et al., 2021)

Key findings Finding flow is key, and interruptions are a drag. Minimal or no interruptions give developers an 82% chance of having a good day, but interruptions throughout the day decrease the chance of a good day to just 7%. Meetings are both awesome and terrible. Collaboration improves our work, but too many meetings can be a blocker; going from two to three meetings per day lowered the chances of developers making progress toward their goals by 60%. A two minute daily reflection can help developers improve their days

Why?

A good Developer Experience helps devs find flow and reduces interruptions

A good Developer Experience reduces the cognitive load for a developer

A good Developer Experience creates an environment of psychological safety

Conditions for an Awesome DevEx to emerge; 1. There are good boundaries for risk and responsibility 2. Team interactions are optimized for fast flow 3. Adopt an Internal OSS Model 4. Focus on creating fast feedback loops

Q&A 46

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References Cochran, T. (2021) Maximizing Developer Effectiveness. Available at: https://martinfowler.com/articles/developer-effectiveness.html (Accessed: January 11, 2021) Srivasta, S. et al. (2020) How software developers can drive business growth | McKinsey, www.mckinsey.com. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/developer-velocity-how-s oftware-excellence-fuels-business-performance. Forsgren, N. et al. (2021) ‘The SPACE of Developer Productivity: There’s more to it than you think’, ACM Queue, 19, pp. 1–29. Available at: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-space-of-developer-productivity-theres-more-to-it-than-you-t hink/.