Nerd/Noir today announced it has partnered with DX, a provider of a platform for measuring developer experience, to identify areas where organizations can improve developer experiences in less than six weeks.
The consulting firm plans to leverage the DevEx 360 platform created by DX to survey developers before recommending a plan.
Nerd/Noir CEO David Laribee said that approach will make it simpler for DevOps teams to pinpoint where changes to workflows will have the most impact on 25 different key performance indicators (KPIs).
In addition, DevOps teams will be able to compare their results against more than 120,000 anonymized data samples collected across multiple industries and sectors.
There’s a lot of focus on developer productivity these days, largely because more organizations realize the extent to which they have become dependent on software to drive revenue and improve profitability. The challenge is organizations can’t afford to hire an unlimited number of developers, so many are now embracing platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale.
Most DevOps teams track metrics, but they are generally focused on software engineering issues rather than actual developer productivity. Measuring developer productivity tends to be a less exact science. Once upon a time, an organization might have tracked the lines of code being written, but the total number of lines of code written may not be especially good. In more recent times, metrics have been developed that, among other things, keep track of how much time developers spend actually coding versus maintaining their software development environment.
The issue that organizations are contending with is that more responsibility for managing everything from development environments to provisioning and securing cloud infrastructure has shifted, and the cognitive load that each developer is required to carry has increased. Every minute developers spend on these tasks, however, is, in theory, one less minute developers are potentially spending writing the business logic that drives an application.
Of course, there’s no way developers are going to write business logic for eight hours straight every day, so there are maintenance windows. However, application development is as much art as it is science. No one knows for sure when inspiration might strike, but if developers are busy maintaining code that they created to provision infrastructure, the less probable it becomes for some flash of brilliant insight into how an application might be made better is likely to occur.
DevOps teams need to strike a delicate balance. Developers like to be able to experiment with new tools and platforms, so any approach to platform engineering that smacks of totalitarianism will be resisted, and IT leaders need to proceed with caution. If talented developers start heading for the exits, IT leaders will find it difficult to replace them because great developers, even in an economic downturn, are still difficult to hire and retain. The challenge and the opportunity are to convince developers to embrace changes to workflows based on their input versus imposing one that benefits the DevOps teams more than the developers those teams are supposed to support.