Developer experience (DX) is in the zeitgeist, and for a good reason. Digital demands are increasing, yet the market faces cautious IT budgeting, workplace burnout, and high resignations. The idea is that quality developer experience can help keep the remaining talent happy and increase productivity. And organizations are considering many strategies for increasing DX, such as creating more usable interface interfaces, maintaining intuitive documentation and abstracting complexity with more automation and low-code.
Another way to increase productivity is by slimming down the time it takes to test and deliver software. There are many potential hurdles in the way of deploying new code, and a cumbersome pipeline can easily take a programmer out of the flow. The practice of streamlining this toolchain is known by some as Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE). DPE focuses on improving developer productivity through accelerating DevOps processes, like CI/CD pipelines.
I recently met with Hans Dockter, founder and CEO of Gradle, to understand the core tenants behind DPE. According to Dockter, the dialogue with the toolchain is a developer’s bread and butter, and optimizing this exchange is vital for quickly validating new ideas. Below, we’ll seek to understand what DPE is and how it might increase the pace of software delivery. We’ll also consider some methods for implementing DPE in practice.
Roadblocks in the Development Toolchain
Engineers are always experimenting with new feature development. “A developer needs to have a dialogue with their toolchain to see if their hypothesis makes sense,” explained Dockter. Yet, there are many potential barriers to instant feedback. For example, a toolchain may be comprised of code compilation, static code analysis, unit testing, performance testing, security testing and other checks. Running new changes through a CI/CD pipeline can take anywhere from a few seconds to minutes or hours. In his work, Dockter has even encountered teams that deal with a 24-hour feedback cycle time.
Long wait times can be taxing as they demand users to switch contexts. Neuroscientists say that multitasking depletes glucose in the brain and leads to exhaustion. Similarly, Dockter argued that long waiting periods with the toolchain can take developers out of the flow and slow down the pace of software delivery. “You cannot have a good developer experience without good productivity.”
Furthermore, he added that engineers often encounter untrustworthy signals from their toolchains. If testing suites produce too many false positives, for example, you can lose faith in the tooling altogether. This equates to a bad experience and may result in developers overlooking important signals that do matter.
Understanding Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE)
DPE is all about improving developer efficiency. And quickening the feedback cycle is one method to enhance developer productivity. According to Dockter, DPE applies a few strategies to streamline this feedback loop and shorten the timeframe:
- Optimizing which tests are run: First, Dockter recommended only running tests relevant to the change at hand. Optimizing test selection can reduce bulky builds and significantly reduce the time it takes.
- Caching: Caching is integral to any web application, so why not apply similar heuristics for the development pipeline? This could involve caching code that is not changed. “Changes are often incremental from one feedback cycle to the next. A lot of output is produced that can be reused,” said Dockter.
- Predictive test selection: To automate test optimizations, Dockter recommended predictive test selection to understand which tests are sensitive to which areas of code. This would utilize an AI trained on release mechanics to help pinpoint what components the changes modify and, thus, what tests to run.
- Test distribution: Another way to accelerate the pipeline is by distributing testing processing. Using multiple machines to test different areas simultaneously could greatly speed up the routine. Test distribution “is a modern approach to test parallelism that accelerates test execution by taking existing test suites and distributing them across remote agents to execute them faster,” wrote Marc Philipp and Hans Dockter in The Developer Productivity Engineering Handbook.
- Monitor the toolchain: Lastly, it’s good to continuously monitor failure analytics to discover where the toolchain itself is causing trouble, said Dockter. On the side, CI/CD pipelines are not immune to security vulnerabilities and should be treated with the same security standards as other infrastructure.
DPE principles have already been applied at DoorDash, LinkedIn, Netflix and other organizations.
Benefits of Developer Productivity Engineering
In the last few years, DX has moved from niche to mainstream, said Dockter. In fact, DX has even entered the C-suite, as certain companies have embraced the role of chief developer experience officer CDX). And with the emerging discipline of platform engineering, we’re seeing an even greater focus on streamlining internal DevOps workflows.
And although platform roles may have been viewed as second-class engineers in the past, said Dockter, they are held in high esteem nowadays. “It’s as important as the other engineering work we’re doing,” he said. Developer productivity engineering seems to align with these principles, helping organizations manage the effects of an exponentially expanding code base. In the end, an investment in DPE, like platform engineering, could bring more satisfactory working conditions and accelerate the pace of software development.
“DX is a transformative opportunity, but most companies invest incrementally. The economic benefits are transformative for companies developing infrastructure to get more output from their developers.”
