INDUSTRY NEWS

Addressing Amazon’s Mammoth Developer Experience Challenge

In a recent Business Insider article (September 2022), Eugene Kim reports that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is trying to fix a crumbling engineering culture with a new unit called Amazon Software Builder Experience (ASBX). The ASBX mission is to tackle “foundational pain points” raised by the company’s frustrated developers. Recent internal surveys, viewed by Insider, quantify some developer pain and process waste with the following statistics:

• 34% of the engineers said they spent 4-8 hours on undifferentiated (i.e., non-value-added) efforts weekly
• 10-20% of engineering time is spent doing things unrelated to building new products
• 30% of engineering time is spent performing “repetitive tasks”

We looked at the Amazon situation and offered solutions in a recent blog post titled “Advice for Andy Jassy: Addressing Amazon’s Mammoth Developer Experience Challenge.” To summarize: Make the practice of Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) a more central part of the plan to improve “Build Tools.” Why? This will provide a hard ROI and a quick win to address the developer productivity pain points and process waste quantified in the surveys cited above. We encourage Jassy to push tooling decisions and buying power closer to the teams directly feeling the pain of inadequate tooling daily. Ultimately, Jassy and his team would benefit from learning more about the role DPE can play in addressing Amazon’s considerable challenge to solve their DevX crises and transform the Amazon developer experience into a competitive advantage.

Introducing the Developer Productivity Engineering Maturity Model

The DPE maturity model provides a formal description of how this practice will evolve and mature in a broad range of IT settings. It is presented as a matrix consisting of five levels (Idling, Dabbling, Experimenting, Practicing, and Scaling) defined along five dimensions (People, Technology, Reporting & Business Impact, Leadership, and Process).

The model intends to help DPE practitioners, deployment leaders, and executives:

• Benchmark where their companies stand in relation to broader adoption patterns experienced by comparable organizations within and across industries
• Assess the areas of strength and performance gaps in their deployments
• Pinpoint specific steps they might take to close gaps and graduate to their next journey stage
• Communicate progress to developer productivity stakeholders in the practitioner, management, and executive communities to garner support for existing efforts or make the case to expand the initiative’s footprint

Anatomy of a Build Cache Node Crash

Gradle recently experienced a build cache node crash that was impacting build times. In this post, the Gradle team explored the information Gradle Enterprise Trends & Insights– combined with the wealth of data from local and CI builds provided by Build Scans– generated before, during, and after the build cache node crash. This data made it easy to spot that the slow build performance problem was with the infrastructure.

If only CI builds data existed, the cause of the problem wouldn’t be obvious to anyone running a local build. An administrator would have no idea that anything was wrong until another CI build was run. Even if a team knew something was wrong, without Gradle Enterprise, it would be much more difficult for an administrator to figure out the problem.

This post provides an interesting blow-by-blow account of how the team used its own tooling to understand an unobvious problem so that it could be addressed more efficiently.

ApacheCon 2022 Keynote and Takeaways

Gradle Inc. founder and CEO Hans Dockter delivered the keynote at ApacheCon on October 6, 2022, in New Orleans. Hans shared his ideas on how DPE can benefit Open Source Software (OSS) communities and projects in his address.

After the conference, Hans penned an overview for Spiceworks, covering what he discussed and his takeaways from the event. Some highlights include:

• For years, open-source foundations have known that it’s in their best interest to help secure the supply chain. Now there’s collaboration and mature discussion about which approaches are best.
• ML platforms are proliferating throughout Apache.
• The days of open-source communities resisting corporate influence and vice versa are long gone.
• DPE is the most transformative movement in software development since Agile and DevOps.

Now Available On Demand: DevProdEng Showdown S2E3 – Developer Tools at Scale

In the most recent Showdown, tooling experts Leanne Kerford, Software Developer, Cash App; John Burns, Senior Software Engineer, GrubHub; Martin Chalupa, Senior Software Engineer, Netflix; and Ryan Menezes, Software Engineering Manager, Meta, shared their views on how to best leverage tools to improve productivity and the developer experience at large-scale leading-edge organizations. Watch this episode to get the experts’ take on topics such as:

• Biggest developer productivity mistakes
• Mono-repo vs. Multi-repo
• Balancing tooling churn/stability vs. shipping new features
• Identifying pain points in the developer life cycle
• The next big thing in developer productivity
• And find out which panelists earned the most live audience votes for the best answers and insights.

Don’t Miss These Opportunities to Learn More