Happy February, all. We’re excited to host GitHub Copilot on Mar-13 in our next DPE Lowdown—don’t miss out! We also look at how 17 leading companies implement DPE initiatives, share advice from developer productivity experts at Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Spotify, and explore what Red Hat is up to with Backstage. Plus, new job openings, and a special mini quiz about DPE! Have a productive month—and ping me at owhite@gradle.com if you need anything.

FEATURED UPCOMING EVENT

Mar-13  |  GitHub Copilot joins DPE Lowdown to show how AI is playing a role in DevProd

 

“Life’s better with company. Everybody needs a co-pilot”
- George Clooney

 

By now, you’ve probably heard of GitHub Copilot, the AI coding assistant shaking up the developer world by its heels. Whether you have or not, don’t miss the next DevProdEng Lowdown, where we chat with Christopher Harrison from GitHub to understand how Copilot customers are using AI to achieve their DPE goals. 

 

Christopher will share the details on how Copilot customers are using the tool to get a 30-40% increase in productivity. Note that one in three Fortune 500 companies are Copilot customers!

 

The agenda topics include:

  • What is GitHub Copilot and how does it work?

  • How Copilot leverages AI to make developers’ lives easier and how they can get the most out of it

  • Copilot customer developer productivity wins and success stories, including Copilot’s impact on builds/tests

  • Best practices for rolling out Copilot at scale

  • Where is the puck heading: the future of software development with Artificial Intelligence

We expect an especially high level of interest in this Lowdown, so register early to ensure your spot!

 
Save your seat

BEST PRACTICES

17 real-life examples of developer productivity metrics put to use

Developers know it’s a trap to compare a 100-person startup (or a 100-year-old bank) to digital natives like Google, Netflix, Airbnb, Spotify, etc. 

 

Echoes of “We aren’t them” sum this up; however, we’ve got some good news. When it comes to DPE tools and practices, organizations with 100 developers can benefit from the same methods as those with 100,000 developers. 

 

The excellent Pragmatic Engineer Substack by Gergely Orosz recently published findings by Abi Noda (see his DPE Summit talk) covering how 17 companies implement DPE tools and practices. Whether you are small, medium, or large, there are examples of DPE structures, terminology, and practices for comparison:

 

Google

  • Size: Large, 100,000 developers 

  • Terminology used:  Engineering Productivity, Developer Intelligence

  • What they measure: Speed, Ease, Quality 

LinkedIn

  • Size: Medium, 10,000 developers 

  • Terminology used:  Productivity and Happiness, Developer Insights, Developer Experience Index

  • What they measure: Developer Net User Satisfaction (NSAT), Developer Build Time, Code Reviewer Response Time, Post-Commit CI Speed, CI Determinism, Deployment Success Rate 

Peloton 

  • Size: Small, 3,000 developers

  • Terminology used:  Tech Enablement, Developer Experience 

  • What they measure: Engagement, Velocity, Quality, Stability

The article contains more details naturally, but the main takeaways conclude that “DORA and SPACE metrics are used selectively” (mainly by Microsoft, the author of the SPACE framework), that qualitative metrics measuring the developer experience itself are frequently used, and that the cognitive load of regular interruptions is highly detrimental to developer “focus time”, a metric tracked more widely than originally expected.

 
See how your team’s DPE initiatives compare

DPE QUIZ

Which of the following is NOT a focus of Developer Productivity Engineering tools and practices?

a) Internal developer surveys

b) Failure analytics dashboards

c) Lines of code written over time

d) Build caching to eliminate extra work

e) Test distribution to speed up tests

 

p.s. answer is at the bottom of this page

 

EXPERT TAKES

Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Spotify share how they’re measuring developer productivity

You may recall that last month we published all the videos and slides from DPE Summit 2023. But with over 40 presentations available to explore, where should you start? 

 

Well, one topic that comes up again and again within software organizations—and was therefore a common discussion point at DPE Summit—is how to effectively measure developer productivity. Is it DORA? Is it internal surveys? Is it custom dashboards? Or something else entirely? 

 

In the section above we saw Gergely Orosz break this down, but to learn exactly how Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Spotify tackle the challenges of DPE metrics, check out these videos: 

So if you missed DPE Summit 2023, watch these videos and stay tuned for announcements about DPE Summit 2024, which will take place September 24-25, 2024 in San Francisco. Event registration opens soon…

 
Watch DPE Summit 2023 sessions

INDUSTRY NEWS

Red Hat doubles down on IDPs, introducing a new developer platform based on Spotify's Backstage

The old saying used to go “No one gets fired for buying IBM”. Now that Big Blue and Red Hat joined forces, is it fair to say that where Red Hat goes the software industry will follow?

 

It depends. 

 

Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) are proving to be increasingly valuable for not only developer productivity but also developer onboarding. In his recent DPE Summit talk, Lee Mills revealed that Backstage users at Spotify have reduced their “time to 10th PR” for new hires from 66 days to 22 days and that Backstage users are 2.3x more active on GitHub than non-users.

 

Red Hat is not an organization to miss an opportunity like this—they describe their new Developer Hub as designed to “provide IT organizations with an extensible instance of Backstage for Kubernetes environments to improve developer productivity”.

 

While it’s clearly meant as an on-ramp for Red Hat products like OpenShift, Quarkus, and Ansible, this showcases the extensibility and customizations possible using Backstage as a flexible foundation for developer productivity initiatives. 

 

Red Hat promoting and contributing to a product like Backstage is a good sign, and we’re interested to see what kind of uptake it gets among users. Read the full article by Mike Vizard for more details.

 
Read the article

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

DPE Job Openings

The industry needs you! You might find your dream role among these job openings related to DPE, developer productivity, and platform engineering. 

 

NOTE: These postings are active at the time of sending but are subject to change.

 

Quiz Answer:

c) Lines of code written over time

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