Terrible tales of toxic tests; 35% off Droidcon SF for DPE newsletter subscribers; meet us in Berlin, Boston, London, and D.C.; Platform Engineering–what IS and ISN’T; plus a quiz, stat, and DPE job openings! Catch me at owhite@gradle.com if you need anything :-) Have a safe and productive month! 
 

BEST PRACTICES

Toxic tests: why your tests are failing YOU (and what to do about it)

"I find flaky tests so frustrating—we spend all this time, effort, and energy writing automated acceptance tests, only for them to sometimes pass and sometimes fail...[eventually] we start to ignore all of our tests."

 

-Trisha Gee, Lead Developer Advocate at Gradle Inc.

 

Flaky tests are no fun, and even highly advanced software teams at organizations like Netflix are challenged by this problem. 

 

In this short video on the Continuous Delivery channel by Trisha Gee, she discusses the manifold negative impacts of flaky tests on our cognitive health, team morale, and overall developer productivity—along with a certain ray of hope! 

 
Watch the video (9 min)

COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHT

Get 35% off Droidcon San Francisco (June 6-7) and join Gradle's full DPE track with experts from AMEX, Pinterest, Slack, Tiktok, Uber, and more

Calling all Bay Area Android developers! Gradle is sponsoring a DPE track at Droidcon SF. As one of the four tracks at the conference, these sessions focus on developer productivity and developer happiness. Learn from Gradle customers and engineers as they describe how to achieve productivity gains using Gradle and Develocity with Android Studio.

 

Find us in the Fisher West/DPE Track rooms, and pick up your 35% discount with the voucher code "GRADLEDPE"!

 
Get 35% off Droidcon SF from Gradle

DPE DATA POINT

Investing in DPE pays for itself in less than 6 months

Over two-thirds of 63 surveyed IT organizations experienced a payback period for their investment in Developer Productivity Engineering within the first 6 months. That’s pretty good, right?

 
See the source

FEATURED UPCOMING EVENTS

DPE Tours coming to Berlin, Boston, London, and Washington D.C., finishing with DPE Summit Sept 24-25

Our DPE Tours have visited San Francisco, Dallas, Seattle, Atlanta, and New York City, and the tour is only halfway through! 

 

If you’re in the area, join DPE and DevEx experts from some of the world’s most exciting companies during these half-day, in-person events—featuring free drinks, food, and hallway chats, followed by a Happy Hour either on-site or at a nearby venue:  

If you’re planning to attend, now is the time to secure your presence at DPE Summit—Sep 24-25 in San Francisco. Our starting line-up of amazing speakers features Brian Houck (Microsoft), Ty Smith and Adam Huda (Uber), Aubrey Chipman and Roberto Perez Alcolea (Netflix), Helen Gruel (Spotify), and Szczepan Faber and Akshat Batia (Airbnb), with 30+ more to come!


Register now to secure the Early-Bird rate of $249, and stay tuned for more updates!

 
More on DPE Summit 2024

PODCASTS ON DPE

Podcast: InfoQ asks Hans Dockter about why developers are facing cognitive fatigue, how bad tests make everything worse, and how to keep developers productive and happy

Gradle founder and CEO Hans Dockter recently sat down with Shane Hastie for the InfoQ Engineering Culture Podcast to dive deeper into how cognitive science can directly influence developer productivity. If you're too busy to listen, here are some notable quotes from the interview (text lightly edited for readability):

  • "When you write a line of code, it's a hypothesis. Many people outside of software don't understand that. They think, "Oh, it's mathematics." No. It's a hypothesis that for all practical purposes cannot prove that it's doing what it's supposed to do. So you need, philosophically as a developer, to have a dialogue with the toolchain, like a physicist needs to have a dialogue with nature when they have a hypothesis via experiments."

  • “When you cannot trust the tests, why write them? When you start ignoring them, why write them? I think it's hugely problematic for the testing culture that things are very slow because you don't run tests often and that they're very often flaky.”

  • "From a cultural perspective, what does it tell you as a developer when your feedback cycle time gets longer and longer and longer? When the developer infrastructure creates wrong signals? It tells me that productivity doesn't seem to be the highest goal in this company."

  • "Context switching is accelerating cognitive fatigue. And neurologically it makes sense when we have a certain problem we want to solve with cognitive control, we really have to create a dynamic pattern in our brain. That takes energy to build that and get in a state to solve a particular problem. And when I switch the problem, I have to rebuild the inputs, the outputs that I want to achieve or the goals."

  • "Cognitive control means you have the inputs and you know what you want to achieve, but there is no pathway yet to get to this goal. That's the miracle of human intelligence that we are able to do this... No one is surprised by the concept of cognitive fatigue, but we are completely ignoring this in software development. And when you look at Elon Musk, [who says] just work harder, don't sleep. It just doesn't work that way."
Listen to the podcast (29 min)

QUIZ SECTION

Which of the following most accurately describes the SPACE framework as an acronym?

  1. Satisfaction, Peak Load, Actions, Communication, Effectiveness

  2. Sense of Achievement, Productivity, Appeasement, Collaboration, Effort 

  3. Satisfaction, Performance, Activity, Communication, Efficiency

  4. Superiority, Pursuit, Activity, Cooperation, Expectations

P.S. answer at the bottom of the page

 

IDEAS & INSIGHT

So...what exactly is Platform Engineering? A Forbes contributor hopes to set the record straight

As the discussion around Platform Engineering grows on analyst hype cycles and radars, it’s useful to remind ourselves what something is and isn’t. A perfect solution is a rare if not impossible thing, and by setting expectations early and often we can reduce the risk of disappointments and wasted time. 

 

Writing in Forbes, author Paul Stovell believes you can avoid pitfalls by sticking with the following principles:

 

What Platform Engineering IS:

  • Approaching platforms as products

  • Developer Experience

  • Automation and tooling

  • Monitoring and performance optimization

What Platform Engineering IS NOT:

  • A shared service

  • Solely IT operations

  • Exclusively about technology

  • Solely about developers

Paul finishes with a level-headed recommendation:

 

"The introduction of platform engineering needs to be aligned to specific goals. You should have a clear idea of which pain a platform will solve before you commit to introducing an IDP. Once developers depend on a platform, you are committed to maintaining it over the long term."

 

P.S. Did you know that Backstage (open-sourced by Spotify), is the leading developer portal on the market with over 4 million users? Learn more about it in this DPE Lowdown.

 
Why Spotify built their own DPE platform

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:

 

3. Satisfaction (and well-being), Performance, Activity, Communication (and collaboration), Efficiency (and flow)

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