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Lead Developer Challenges and Pain Points
As the senior member of your development team(s), you take accountability for your team’s productivity and ownership of the developer experience. DPE provides a new outcome-focused approach to addressing this challenge with a proven, hard ROI-based business case. It uses an engineering rather than a management approach to improve the developer process and experience. As a result, there is little or no resistance to product acceptance; rather DPE is almost always embraced with genuine excitement.
DPE contrasts with the Developer Productivity Management (DPM) approach which treats productivity as a people problem (i.e., how best to manage a developer’s time, motivate, evaluate and compensate them). The main problem with this approach is that it often incentivizes the wrong types of behavior with measures of activity level that provide a soft or dubious ROI. As a result, developer team acceptance is difficult. By focusing instead on technology/automation driven solutions rather than management best practices, you are more likely to have the bandwidth to play the champion role for developer productivity across your organization. With DPE you can:
Prove and quantify the impact of productivity improvements to the engineering leadership team with hard savings from faster feedback cycles using your own data, while achieving better recruiting and retention results.
Leverage data and a more reliable toolchain to provide metric/trend observability, and optimize build and test performance and failure rates, including flaky tests.
Build a strong culture of collaboration and accountability, including empowering developers with self-service troubleshooting tools and incentivizing the right developer behavior when nobody’s looking.
Solution Capabilities
Develocity provides analytics for every build and test that can be aggregated to determine average build time savings which can be easily translated into hard developer cost savings. This and other ROI contributions can be modeled and tracked using our online calculator. This, in turn, can be used to build a business case for DPE or justify on-going investment in your DPE initiative. The following Develocity solution capabilities represent the key enablers for your developer productivity initiative success.
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Performance Acceleration
Develocity Performance Acceleration technologies (including Build Cache, Predictive Test Selection, Test Distribution and Performance Continuity) address the pain of unnecessary developer idle time waiting for builds and tests to complete. They enable DPE teams to drive happier and more productive developers with faster feedback cycles that keep developers in the creative flow and minimize context switching. Typical Develocity customers cut build & test times 50-90% using just one of these technologies.
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Build Scan®
The Build Scan service gives developers deep data for every build, so they can quickly find the root cause and fix their own problems without re-running broken builds to reproduce problems or requiring the help of your build engineering team. When help is required, collaborating with the build engineering team on fixes is as easy as sharing a Build Scan link. In combination with failure analytics (described next), Develocity customers report reducing troubleshooting (MTTR) time on average by two-thirds.
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Failure Analytics
Unreliable builds cause downtime, waste compute resources and are a massive distraction. They also negatively affect the quality of the code that is shipped. Builds become unreliable when problems are too expensive to find, too hard to reproduce, and when fixes can not be correctly prioritized because their relative impact is unknown.
Build and Test Failure Analytics leverage data to proactively find unreliable builds and tests, learn how many people and environments are affected by problems (like flaky tests), share information about them, and understand the root cause efficiently. As a result, developers have confidence in the build logic and test suites which encourages a culture of accountability and good behavior.
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Trends & Insights
Trends & Insights enable you to observe performance and reliability metrics in real time against baselines and detect anomalous trends. With these insights, you can respond proactively to systemic problems and longer-term performance regressions rather than being complaint driven. Trends & Insights, combined with efforts to monitor and act on them, provides the foundation for building an always-learning and continuously-improving software engineering culture.
Conservatively we’ve gained back 1 day of lost productivity every week.
Michael Andrejko, Architect