The first annual Developer Productivity Engineering Summit will take place on November 2-3 in San Francisco. This two-day, dual-track event features the leading minds in Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE). The theme is “Next Practices for Transforming the Developer Experience.”
So, what do we mean by “next practice”?
Let’s start with the more familiar term: best practice. A best practice codifies what has worked in the past to determine what will most likely work in the present. Of course, it makes sense to learn from the past. After all, those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. For that reason, best practices are not going away.
But what if the world is changing so fast that what worked in the past and is deemed a best practice now, is obsolete, or at least a lot less relevant, by the time it’s deployed. Given the accelerating pace of change in customer preferences, employee expectations, technology, business models, and economic conditions, it’s reasonable to conclude this is increasingly the case. As a result, in addition to leaning on venerable best practices, we need to start thinking more about next practices which are forward-looking, and focus on anticipating and reimagining the future.
What distinguishes next practices from best practices is that next practices effect transformational change rather than incremental change. Rather than investing more into honing existing or legacy IT practices and processes incrementally, next practices are about inventing new ones. As such, next practices focus on experimentation and exploration. In contrast, best practices lean into the “tried and true” and are mostly concerned with minimizing the risk of failure.
Best practices will always be relevant and, when leaned on in the proper context, will remain useful. But their effectiveness is likely to wane in a world where you live or die by the speed with which you experiment, iterate, pivot, and deliver. Next practices are built for this world. So, if rapid development and delivery of quality software at scale is mission-critical, it’s time to focus on the next set of practices that come after DevOps and build on its success.
DPE is a “next practice” because it’s what comes after the traditional practice of addressing developer productivity with management decrees and best practices. Rather than looking at developer productivity at its core as just another people challenge—focused on issues of motivation, morale, skill gaps, time management, and compensation—it views developer productivity primarily as a technology and engineering challenge.
Further, many of the concepts and tools that comprise DPE are also next practices. The graphic below provides some examples. The theme is the use of advanced automation, data analytics, and bleeding-edge technologies like machine learning to drive your future, rather than being constrained by it.
Today, DPE next practice pioneers are focused on addressing the next set of challenges that come after DevOps and its dark costs. This includes the waste associated with avoidably long feedback cycles, unreliable “flaky” feedback, and inefficient troubleshooting. It also includes a general lack of observability of basic build and test telemetry data and performance and failure trends.
Many of these pioneers and thought leaders representing the most elite dev teams in the world will share their successful DPE next practices at Developer Productivity Engineering Summit 2022. You can peruse the agenda of speakers and topics and learn everything else you need to know about this event by visiting dpesummit.com.
If you’re a software development project leader, productivity and build engineer, solution architect, software development organization manager or executive leader, you should attend this event. Members of the software industry analyst, influencer, or media community won’t want to miss this unique congregation of thought leaders either. Register by October 23 and you will still be eligible for the early bird price of admission.