Developer Productivity (is?) Waste - Preparing for the next wave of DevX mania.

Want to improve developer productivity? As mentioned at the end of the talk, check out the Tanzu Platform, mentioned at the end of the talk.

Presented at NDC Oslo, June 12th, 2024.

Transcript

1. 1 Preparing for the continuous deployment of DevX mania. Coté – June 12th, 2024 Developer Productivity is Waste
2. 2 Developer Productivity: The quick answers
3. 3 Source: “DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity," Abi Noda, Margaret-Anne Storey, Nicole Forsgren, Microsoft Research, Michaela Greiler, May 2023. Happiness, flow, features
4. 4 Source: "Yes, you can measure software developer productivity," Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson, Alharith Hussin, Jason Keovichit, Shivam Srivastava, McKinsey Aug(?) 2023. developers
5. 5 Source: "Yes, you can measure software developer productivity," Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson, Alharith Hussin, Jason Keovichit, Shivam Srivastava, McKinsey Aug(?) 2023. Focus here for developer productivity
6. 6 Coté https://newsletter.cote.io/ | cote@broadcom.com
7. 7 Source: "Yes, you can measure software developer productivity," Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson, Alharith Hussin, Jason Keovichit, Shivam Srivastava, McKinsey Aug(?) 2023.
8. 8 Sources: "Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’? The choice is yours," Aaron De Smet, Bonnie Dowling, Marino Mugayar-Baldocchi, Bill Schaninger, McKinsey, Sep 2021; "Yes, you can measure software developer productivity," Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson, Alharith Hussin, Jason Keovichit, and Shivam Srivastava, McKinsey, August, 2023.
9. 9 Source: “Shoggoth with Smiley Face (Artificial Intelligence)," Know Your Meme, ~2023.
10. 10 26% of organizations are using GenAI to support application development, testing, and management and 25% are utilizing machine learning with the greatest focus on leveraging AI to support DevOps analytics and process, governance, and security testing.
11. 11 What is “developer productivity”?
12. 12 Engineering leaders have long sought to improve the productivity of their developers, but knowing how to measure or even define developer productivity has remained elusive.” The Problem “ Source: “DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity," Abi Noda, Margaret-Anne Storey, Nicole Forsgren, Microsoft Research, Michaela Greiler, May 2023. “Programming productivity,” Wikipedia, accessed June 12th, 2024. there is no clear-cut definition of productivity and its influencing factors, although research has been conducted for more than a century. Like in software engineering, this lack of common agreement on what actually constitutes productivity, is perceived as a major obstacle for a substantiated discussion of productivity.” “
13. 13 Step 01: Define what “developer productivity” is for you Source: “Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey," Kent Beck and Gergely Orosz, August 2023.
14. 14 Step 01: Define what “developer productivity” is for you Source: “Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey," Kent Beck and Gergely Orosz, August 2023.
15. 15 Why? …and who’s asking?
16. 16 Developers getting better at craft. Improvement.
17. 17 Sources: Know Your Meme. It’s usually this person asking.
18. 18 1.Are we paying too much? 2.Could we get by with paying less? 3.Who should I give more money to? 4.Who should I punish/fire? Money.
19. 19 Adding more developers vs. Increasing productivity per developer Business Growth. Source: Software Engineering at Google, chapter 11, various, March 202
20. 20 At the Metrics Buffett
21. 21 Source: “Measure Software Delivery Performance with Four Key Metrics,” Nicole Forsgren ,Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Feb, 2021. “The SPACE of Developer Productivity," Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey, Chandra Maddila, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck, and Jenna Butler, Jan-Feb, 2021. Also see: "Developer Thriving: The four factors that drive Software Developer Productivity across Industries,” and, low usage of DORA and SPACE at tech companies from Abi Noda, Jan, 2024. DORA SPACE
22. 22 Source: “DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity," Abi Noda, Margaret-Anne Storey, Nicole Forsgren, Microsoft Research, Michaela Greiler, May 2023. See earlier study: “The SPACE of Developer Productivity: There's more to it than you think," Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey, Chandra Maddila, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck, and Jenna Butler, Jan-Feb, 2021. Happiness, flow, features Or, “stop interrupting me!”
23. 23 Features Maintenance Source: “A Useful Productivity Measure?” James Shore, May 2024. Hygiene Time spent on… Not good.
24. 24 Developer Productivity Tools
25. 25 Find the Developer Toil, Confusion, Blockers Find the Developer Toil, Confusion, Blockers - What are we making? - We have a strong vision for our product, and we're doing important work together every day to fulfill that vision. - I have the context I need to confidently make changes while I'm working. - I am proud of the work I have delivered so far for our product. - I am learning things that I look forward to applying to future products. - My workstation seems to disappear out from under me while I'm working. - It's easy to get my workstation into the state I need to develop our product. - What aspect of our workstation setup is painful? - It's easy to run our software on my workstation while I’m developing it. - I can boot our software up into the state I need with minimal effort. - What aspect of running our software locally is painful? What could we do to make it less painful? - It's easy to run our test suites and to author new ones. - Tests are a stable, reliable, seamless part of my workflow. - Test failures give me the feedback I need on the code I am writing. - What aspect of production support is painful? - We collaborate well with the teams whose software we integrate with. - When necessary, it is within my power to request timely changes from other teams. - I have the resources I need to test and code confidently against other teams' integration points. - What aspect of integrating with other teams is painful? - I'm rarely impacted by breaking changes from other tracks of work. - We almost always catch broken tests and code before they're merged in. - What aspect of committing changes is painful? - Our release process (CI/CD) from source control to our story acceptance environment is fully automated. - If the release process (CI/CD) fails, I'm confident something is truly wrong, and I know I'll be able to track down the problem. - What aspect of our release process (CI/CD) is painful? - Our team releases new versions of our software as often as the business needs us to. - We are meeting our service-level agreements with a minimum of unplanned work. - When something is wrong in production, we reproduce and solve the problem in a lower environment. Sources: "Developer Toil: The Hidden Tech Debt," Susie Forbath, Tyson McNulty, and Coté, August, 2022. See also Michael Galloway’s interview questions for platform product managers.
26. 26 Put CI/CD in place
27. 27 Waste is outside the box Sources: "The Power of a Path-to-Production Workshop," Bryan Ross, September 2023.
28. 28 2016 2010 2001 2005 2011 Note: originally attributed to Grady Booch in 1991, also XP principal in 1998. Sources: book listings, Sourceforge(!), Wikipedia on Sep 1st, 2023. Printer firmware? Hold my beer.
29. 29 25% 24% 23% 25% 24% 27% 35% 37% 40% 41% 41% 47% 50% 65% 65% 54% 56% 58% 50% 50% 61% 54% 53% 55% 53% 53% 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 CI and CD usage, 2007 to 2021 CD CI Sources: State of Agile Surveys, VersionOne/CollabNet/digital.ai.
30. 30 29% 32% 34% 29% 27% 32% 36% 37% 33% 29% 2021Q3 2022Q1 2023Q1 2023Q3 2024Q1 CI and CD Usage, 2021 to 2024 CD CI Question: Which of the following technologies have you used as part of your development activities in the last 12 months? Source: CD Foundation Surveys (Slashdata). Source: "State of CI/CD Report 2024: The Evolution of Software Delivery Performance," CD Foundation and SlashData, April, 2024, and previous studies.
31. 31 32% 36% 37% 33% 29% 68% 64% 63% 67% 71% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% 2021Q3 2022Q1 2023Q1 2023Q3 2024Q1 CI Usage, 2021 to 2024 CI No CI Question: Which of the following technologies have you used as part of your development activities in the last 12 months? Source: CD Foundation Surveys (Slashdata). Source: "State of CI/CD Report 2024: The Evolution of Software Delivery Performance," CD Foundation and SlashData, April, 2024, and previous studies.
32. 32 Stop building your own platforms, etc.
33. 33 Source: “CNCF Platforms White Paper,” March 2023.
34. 34 Sources: “State of Kubernetes Survey 2024,” VMware Tanzu, June, 2024.
35. 35 Accidental platform gardening Sources: "The State of Spring 2024," VMware Tanzu, May 2024.
36. 36 Source: "Yes, you can measure software developer productivity," Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson, Alharith Hussin, Jason Keovichit, Shivam Srivastava, McKinsey Aug(?) 2023. Focus here for developer productivity
38. 38 🏗 https://tanzu.vmware.com/platform 📨 https://newsletter.cote.io/ Thank You! Slides !
39. 39 Appendix: Grandpa Stories
40. 40 1940’s to 1950’s Sources: “Learn Sociotechnical Systems The Hard Way,” Andrew Clay Shafer, July, 2023.
41. 41 Source: curated by “Tech Time Capsule: Early 1990s Clip Art Captured an Era,” Benj Edwards.
42. 42 2003
43. 43 Sources: “They're rebuilding the Death Star of complexity," dhh, as recounted on Jan 2023.
44. 44 2007 Sources: Learning Rails, Simon St. Laurent and Edd Dumbill, 2008.
45. 45 Sources: “Operations is a competitive advantage… (Secret Sauce for Startups!)” Jesse Robins, Oct 2007.
46. 46 Source: “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr,” John Allspaw & Paul Hammond, 2009. 2009
47. 47 2015 Sources: "Technical Dive into Cloud Native Application Platforms," Brian Gracely, 2015.
48. 48 2017 Source: “Containers Will Not Fix Your Broken Culture,” Bridget Kromhout, Dec 2017.
49. 49 2020 Sources: “The Developer Experience Gap," Stephen O'Grady, RedMonk, October 2020.
50. 50 2022 Source: “DevOps Is Dead. Embrace Platform Engineering,” Aeris Ransom, Humanitec, Sep 22nd
51. 51 2023 Source: "Yes, you can measure software developer productivity," Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson, Alharith Hussin, Jason Keovichit, Shivam Srivastava, McKinsey Aug(?) 2023.
52. 52 26% of organizations are using GenAI to support application development, testing, and management and 25% are utilizing machine learning with the greatest focus on leveraging AI to support DevOps analytics and process, governance, and security testing. Source: “Applying Artificial Intelligence to Strengthen Application Development and Product Life-Cycle Management,” Pete Marston, IDC, Nov 2023 2023
53. 53 Source: “Shoggoth with Smiley Face (Artificial Intelligence)," Know Your Meme, ~2023. 2024-2025