How to put Strategy in Developer Productivity

- From DevOps to Developer Experience: how our team has evolved and what it is today.​
- Our approach to productivity: measuring (using research and data), capabilities (through tooling) and community (for awareness and sharing).​
- How we (attempt to) drive change across the organisation.​
- Practical examples of how we have helped teams improve their flow.​
- Strategy over metrics. People and process matter more than tools (and AI).

Transcript

1. STRATEGY in
3. SOK S Group consists of 19 independent regional cooperatives. SOK is owned by the cooperatives and provides them with services S Group is a customer-owned Finnish network of companies* in the retail and service sectors, with more than 1,900 outlets in Finland
4. Niko Kivelä Head of DevOps @ SOK ▪ DevOps Finland Meetup Organizer ▪ AWS Community Builder ▪ Tech Nordic Advocates Startup Mentor ▪ TEDx, Public Speaker & Published Author Jacob Lärfors Principal Engineer @ SOK ▪ DevOps Finland Meetup Organizer ▪ Developer Experience Summit Speaker ▪ Previously: Founder of Verifa
5. Content 1. How we got here 2. Vision & Mission 3. Strategy: focus areas 4. Takeaways
6. Glossary Developer All engineers involved in the value creation process for software. Product Team A cross-functional team with ownership and autonomy to build, improve, and maintain a software product throughout its lifecycle. Platform Team A team that owns and develops internal tooling, platforms, and processes that enable other teams to deliver software effectively. DX Team Serve SOK engineering teams, so that developers can build products, deliver value to the business and end-users.
7. DevOps Evolution @ SOK Ops DevOps & Platform Ops Capabilities DevOps & Developer Experience Cloud Engineering & Delivery AWS Platform Developer Experience & Productivity DevOps & Developer Experience DevOps & Developer Experience SRE embedded in teams Cross-Functional Security Team QA 2019 2022 2023 2024 2025
8. VISION Why we exist Empower SOK engineering teams to build and deliver digital services autonomously and as frictionlessly as possible. What do we want to be? Future state, long-term.
9. ▪ Sponsorship, OKRs & Backlog are critical ▪ Continuous feedback ▪ Long-term vision is a MUST Our team “as a Business” VISION
10. MISSION What we do Serve SOK engineering teams, so that developers can build products, deliver value to the business, and benefit end- users. Why do we exist? What do we do? How does it help to achieve our vision?
11. ▪ Build, Measure, Learn ▪ Saying NO is healthy; don’t be a bottleneck ▪ We are building products that support our customers A Product Engineering Challenge MISSION
12. Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime. —Lao Tzu
13. Who said they wanted a fish anyway? The Measurement Trap
14. You can’t manage what you don't measure. - Peter Drucker When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. - Goodhart’s Law, Charles Goodhart The Measurement Trap
15. Team siloes are good. Autonomous teams cannot exist without siloes. They provide healthy boundaries. Business siloes are bad. Everyone will be solving the same problems and asking the same questions. Communities bridge siloes. They lower the threshold for seeking help from others and encourages knowledge sharing. Backend Ops Frontend Agile AI QA Design System Security Communities Mobile Tech Lead
16. STRATEGY Where & How Why us? What does it take? ▪ Trust ▪ Companionship ▪ Continuous * You need to be one of the developers to build with them. This cannot be bought! Accelerate SOK engineering effectiveness through data- driven insights and capabilities that optimize the value stream from the developer’s perspective.
17. IT is a moving target… 1. Change is inevitable 2. Measure Right Things 3. Measure Things Right Don’t copy our model. Copy our ideas.
18. Build Capabilities Measure Continuously 1 2 3 Learn & Share Through Communities Discover, research and provide engineers with tools and services that enhance productivity. Focus on discoverability, self- service and stability. 1 Provide insights into software engineering productivity enabling data-driven decisions and teams to improve, autonomously. 2 Cultivate communities to enable knowledge sharing, encourage best practices, provide feedback and offer support. 3 Focus Areas
19. What do we actually do?
20. COMMUNITY
21. SOK Development Guidelines / Niko Kivelä 5.5.2022 COMMUNITY
22. D2M: Development Maturity Model SMA: Service Maturity Assessment Do you have a documented test strategy or plan relevant to your current product lifecycle? Compliance of Security Requirements DORA Version Control •MUST use version control •SHOULD use Git 1.1.2 Follow Principle of Least Privilege Principle of least privilege means that your users should have only the needed access rights, no more. VS VS Deployment Frequency, Lead time for change, MTTR, CFR VS MEASURE
23. Gartner defines software engineering intelligence (SEI) platforms as solutions that provide software engineering leaders data-driven visibility into the engineering team’s use of time and resources, operational effectiveness, and progress on deliverables. Gartner predicts by 2027, 50% of software engineering organizations will use software engineering intelligence platforms to measure and increase developer productivity, compared to 5% in 2024. Gartner the Top Five Strategic Technology Trends in Software Engineering for 2024 16 May 2024 Software Engineering Intelligence Platforms Reviews and Ratings This data-driven visibility enables software engineering leaders and their teams to make smarter business decisions, which leads to the delivery of increased value to customers. MEASURE
24. Adoption Rate Availability Change Failure Rate CI Determinism (CID) Code Review Response Time Deep Work Deployment Frequency Developer Build Time Developer Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net User Satisfaction (NSAT) Ease of Delivery Experiment Velocity (or learning Velocity) Lead Time for Changes Perceived Rate of Delivery Time to Restore Service Time to 1st and 10th PR Weekly Time Loss MEASURE
25. HOW – Tech & Tools We trust in a holistic philosophy for modern and pure software development practices, democratic development standards and the use of modern tools and technologies. Our most-used technologies ▪ Frameworks: React, Next.js, Node.js, GraphQL ▪ Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Golang, Kotlin, Python ▪ Infrastructure: Docker, Gitlab, Terraform, Serverless Framework; Vercel, AWS ECS, Fargate, Lambda ▪ QA: Cypress, Robot Framework, Jest, React Testing Library Check SOK Tech Radar: https://s-group-dev.github.io/tech-radar/ Ari COMMUNITY
26. COMMUNITY
27. COMMUNITY
28. Blameless Post-Mortems - incidents happen by accident CAPABILITY
29. In software development, humans do not cause errors: human error is a consequence of the design of the tools and process that we gave them. Translate local learnings to global improvements CAPABILITY
30. Our IDPortal journey… Needs: 1. Catalog 2. Self-Service CAPABILITY
31. Our IDPortal journey… CAPABILITY
32. Our IDPortal journey… Unnamed IDPortal CAPABILITY
33. TAKEAWAYS
34. THIS IS ABOUT People Capabilities Continuity Technology Helping everyone High performance THIS IS NOT ABOUT
35. ALAO T SI K KO ✓ Capabilities provide features; focusing on tools distracts us from solving real problems. ✓ Measurements help us steer in the right direction. ✓ Communities offer a way to learn, share and engage with our engineers and ensure continuity. Key takeaways
36. Niko Kivelä https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikokivela https://medium.com/@niko.kivela Jacob Lärfors https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlarfors