DevOps.com

  • Latest
    • Articles
    • Features
    • Most Read
    • News
    • News Releases
  • Topics
    • AI
    • Continuous Delivery
    • Continuous Testing
    • Cloud
    • Culture
    • DataOps
    • DevSecOps
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • Leadership Suite
    • DevOps Practice
    • ROELBOB
    • DevOps Toolbox
    • IT as Code
  • Videos/Podcasts
    • Techstrong.tv Podcast
    • Techstrong.tv - Twitch
    • DevOps Unbound
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming
    • Calendar View
    • On-Demand Webinars
  • Library
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Calendar View
    • On-Demand Events
  • Sponsored Content
  • Related Sites
    • Techstrong Group
    • Cloud Native Now
    • Security Boulevard
    • Techstrong Research
    • DevOps Chat
    • DevOps Dozen
    • DevOps TV
    • Techstrong TV
    • Techstrong.tv Podcast
    • Techstrong.tv - Twitch
  • Media Kit
  • About
  • Sponsor
  • AI
  • Cloud
  • CI/CD
  • Continuous Testing
  • DataOps
  • DevSecOps
  • DevOps Onramp
  • Platform Engineering
  • Sustainability
  • Low-Code/No-Code
  • IT as Code
  • More
    • Application Performance Management/Monitoring
    • Culture
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • ROELBOB
Hot Topics
  • Atlassian Advances DevSecOps via Jira Integrations
  • PagerDuty Signals Commitment to Adding Generative AI Capabilities
  • Mastering DevOps Automation for Modern Software Delivery
  • DigiCert Allies With ReversingLabs to Secure Software Supply Chains
  • The Future of Continuous Testing in CI/CD

Home » Blogs » Leadership Suite » 5 Guaranteed Ways to Kill DevOps Developer Productivity

5 Guaranteed Ways to Kill DevOps Developer Productivity

Avatar photoBy: Dan Beauregard on May 10, 2019 1 Comment

“A developer is an organism that turns coffee into code.” I still laugh when I see that quote as it reminds me of my hardcore developer days, when my cube always seemed to be directly next to the coffee machine and caffeine was management’s way of ensuring we had the energy to develop well into the wee hours of the evening.

Recent Posts By Dan Beauregard
  • Speed and Security: How to Find a Balance in Development
Avatar photo More from Dan Beauregard
Related Posts
  • 5 Guaranteed Ways to Kill DevOps Developer Productivity
  • The Evolution of DevOps: Developer Productivity and Platforms
  • 6 Ways To Empower Developers and Increase Productivity
    Related Categories
  • Blogs
  • DevOps Culture
  • Enterprise DevOps
  • Leadership Suite
    Related Topics
  • CD pipeline
  • CI pipeline
  • continuous delivery
  • developer productivity
  • developers
  • devops
  • GUI
Show more
Show less

What is developer happiness? I like to believe it hasn’t changed dramatically over the years. It’s about giving developers the right tools and the freedom to do what they do best—produce meaningful code. That means reducing distractions so they can meet or beat expectations and timelines, ultimately driving revenue for the organization.

Cloud Native NowSponsorships Available

I trust your company is not in the practice of molding reusable human coffee filters. But are you doing everything you can to help your developers be as satisfied and productive as possible, or are you taking the “necessary” steps to ensure they are buried in context-switching hell?

If the latter is your aim, read on to learn about five guaranteed ways you can totally kill developer productivity.

Saddling Developers With ‘Plumbing’ Work

Companies frequently look at developers primarily as technical resources instead of true innovators, so they get saddled with plumbing work. In DevOps and continuous delivery (CD), that’s writing a lot of ad-hoc scripts to string together pipelines, define infrastructure and manually create deployment plans. If your company is on the road to cloud adoption, it’s imperative to get unnecessary scripting under control because things only get more complicated as you start to incorporate the many different cloud platforms and services that are available.

Making Developers Deal With Security After the Fact

A fail-safe way to kill developer productivity is to make them deal with security after a release has left development. Too often, they first build code, QA then tests it and finally someone from security checks it to make sure there are no holes well after the code has been written. If security problems are found after coding is done, the release is halted and must go back to the developer to fix. This often occurs either just before the production release or, worst case, just after. In either case, not only does it take longer to resolve the problem, it also prevents the developer from moving on to the next big thing.

Expecting Them to Chase Down Features and Status Requests

Because development pipelines are often not integrated with the higher-level CD pipeline, those outside of development have no way of seeing the status of features, deployments and releases. Understandably, their only option is to ask developers to provide status information or call a status meeting which, of course, are additional interruptions that divert them from feature development. Developers don’t like it, and it doesn’t exactly help anyone else in the pipeline be more productive, either.

Bogging Developers Down With GUIs

GUIs are a great democratizer in large organizations. They offer a user-friendly way for people across the company, regardless of technical know-how, to access the information they need to be productive. But many developers see them as a waste of time. And while even the most GUI-resistant developer needs them every so often, they are not their preferred way to work.

Taking Away Their Favorite Tools

Standardizing your software delivery process is a must to increase efficiency, but standardizing on tools is not. Taking away their favorite tools is highly recommended only if you’re keen on decreasing developer satisfaction.

What are the Alternatives?

Managers and leaders can help developers by taking as much of these mind-numbing tasks off their plates as possible. They can do that by automating the release process and integrating CI pipelines into the CD pipeline. Doing so allows everyone to plug in to what’s happening in development without having to interrupt developers, and they can continue to use their beloved tools and simply connect them into the release pipelines.

It’s also important to standardize most of your operations work upfront—infrastructure, provisioning, compliance, security. All this advance work will allow developers to consume environments on-demand and just deploy without extensive scripting or re-scripting for changes and maintenance.

Keep in mind, if you shift security left, closer to the development process, you need to automate it. Otherwise, it becomes someone’s manual task—a developer, DevOps engineer or security person—and that will slow down the delivery process. For example, SAST test and SCA scans can be automatically run on every check-in. DAST tests can be automated to run after each build. This way, any security holes are caught as early as possible, while the code is still fresh in the developer’s head.

Finally, reduce the amount of work developers need to do through GUIs. Give them a way to kick off releases from their respective CI pipelines and the ability to define release pipelines—infrastructure, configuration, security and so on—in code.

Coffee Machine or Barista?

Doing these five things—relieving developers of unnecessary scripting, standardizing compliance requirements and security checks upfront, reducing the need for developer-provided status updates, enabling them to work in code and allowing them to continue to use their favorite tools—will make the difference in whether your developers feel like the office coffee machine or a master barista.

— Dan Beauregard

Filed Under: Blogs, DevOps Culture, Enterprise DevOps, Leadership Suite Tagged With: CD pipeline, CI pipeline, continuous delivery, developer productivity, developers, devops, GUI

« Promoting Purpose in Agile Environments
Nutanix Eases Development of IoT Apps »

Techstrong TV – Live

Click full-screen to enable volume control
Watch latest episodes and shows

Upcoming Webinars

Maximize IT Operations Observability with IBM i Within Splunk
Wednesday, June 7, 2023 - 1:00 pm EDT
Secure Your Container Workloads in Build-Time with Snyk and AWS
Wednesday, June 7, 2023 - 3:00 pm EDT
ActiveState Workshop: Building Secure and Reproducible Open Source Runtimes
Thursday, June 8, 2023 - 1:00 pm EDT

GET THE TOP STORIES OF THE WEEK

Sponsored Content

PlatformCon 2023: This Year’s Hottest Platform Engineering Event

May 30, 2023 | Karolina Junčytė

The Google Cloud DevOps Awards: Apply Now!

January 10, 2023 | Brenna Washington

Codenotary Extends Dynamic SBOM Reach to Serverless Computing Platforms

December 9, 2022 | Mike Vizard

Why a Low-Code Platform Should Have Pro-Code Capabilities

March 24, 2021 | Andrew Manby

AWS Well-Architected Framework Elevates Agility

December 17, 2020 | JT Giri

Latest from DevOps.com

Atlassian Advances DevSecOps via Jira Integrations
June 6, 2023 | Mike Vizard
PagerDuty Signals Commitment to Adding Generative AI Capabilities
June 6, 2023 | Mike Vizard
Mastering DevOps Automation for Modern Software Delivery
June 6, 2023 | Krishna R.
DigiCert Allies With ReversingLabs to Secure Software Supply Chains
June 6, 2023 | Mike Vizard
The Future of Continuous Testing in CI/CD
June 6, 2023 | Alexander Tarasov

TSTV Podcast

On-Demand Webinars

DevOps.com Webinar ReplaysDevOps.com Webinar Replays

Most Read on DevOps.com

No, Dev Jobs Aren’t Dead: AI Means ‘Everyone’s a Programmer’? ¦ Interesting Intel VPUs
June 1, 2023 | Richi Jennings
Forget Change, Embrace Stability
May 31, 2023 | Don Macvittie
Revolutionizing the Nine Pillars of DevOps With AI-Engineered Tools
June 2, 2023 | Marc Hornbeek
Friend or Foe? ChatGPT’s Impact on Open Source Software
June 2, 2023 | Javier Perez
Checkmarx Brings Generative AI to SAST and IaC Security Tools
May 31, 2023 | Mike Vizard
  • Home
  • About DevOps.com
  • Meet our Authors
  • Write for DevOps.com
  • Media Kit
  • Sponsor Info
  • Copyright
  • TOS
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Techstrong Group, Inc.

© 2023 ·Techstrong Group, Inc.All rights reserved.