FEATURED UPCOMING EVENT

🎥 Apr-16 webinar - Why did my build fail? Using AI to troubleshoot faster with Failure Summaries

Can you spare less than an hour on April 16? Join our next webinar!

If you’re like most developers, you know that working with CI can be frustrating in large projects. Making a change can generate hundreds of builds with various types of failures—not to mention overall background flakiness. When something goes wrong, troubleshooting requires manually navigating several UIs and many large log files.

This is where "Failure Summaries", an upcoming Develocity feature, comes in to save the day. Built in-house for Gradle engineers, Failure Summaries use AI for categorization and clustering to determine which tests are primarily responsible for a number of failures.

Join me and Laurent Ploix, Senior Product Manager at Gradle, to see just how Failure Summaries can streamline troubleshooting with a deep dive into how to distill complex test failures. Specifically, we’ll go over:

• What measuring developer productivity looks like, which metrics matter, and how we want to simplify troubleshooting

• The effectiveness of extracting CI feedback through the lens of specific evaluation metrics, for example: error log segments, failure clustering into logical groups, root cause identification, and pinpointing infrastructure issues

• Concrete examples as seen in action in the Gradle team's own CI environment.

Hope to see you there!

DPE SUMMIT

🌉 LAST CALL for super-early-bird tickets before prices go up + CFS open for submissions!

If you’re looking to save, now’s the time to get DPE Summit super early bird tickets for just $249. Prices jump to $349 on April 13, so act now to maximize your L&D budget. 

Also, our call for speakers (CFS) window is closing April 27. We look forward to seeing some more great ideas from our community!

EXPERT TAKES

Podcast: Understanding What Really Matters for Developer Productivity

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In this recent InfoQ podcast, host Michael Stiefel sat down with Lizzie Matusov, co-founder and CEO of Quotient, about the importance of software architecture on overall developer productivity. This discussion is a good reminder of different methods of making developer productivity a priority in ways that connect back to the bottom line: value for your customers.

Some key takeaways:

• You cannot have effective, productive, and satisfied teams without having a software architecture that supports that goal.

• Too often software productivity, which is a measure of effective and productive teams, is measured not only poorly but counterproductively, which can lead to low team morale.

• Appropriately partitioned software architectures reduce team dependencies, thus allowing more team independence, which can lead to better team productivity and effectiveness.

Did you know that cognitive fatigue due to context-switching has a major impact on developer productivity? For more on this topic, we recommend Using Cognitive Science to Improve Developer Experience, an interview with Gradle’s co-founder and CEO, Hans Dockter.

DPE UNIVERSITY

Updated Learning Path: Build Scan® Essentials

New on DPEU, we’re happy to share the Build Scan® Essentials learning path. Based on feedback from DPEU participants, this new path breaks down our previous Build Scan training into four, easily-consumable, 20-minute segments: 

1. Get started with Build Scan: Understand the basics of Build Scan and how to use it to gain insights into your builds.

2. Navigate Build Scan: Explore the Build Scan interface and learn how to efficiently find the information you need.

3. Analyze builds with Build Scan: Deep dive into build analysis techniques, identify bottlenecks, and troubleshoot failures.

4. Optimize builds with Build Scan: Discover how to use Build Scan insights to improve build performance and efficiency. 

If you’re not yet familiar with Build Scan, it’s a free feature of Develocity that provides deep analytic information for each of your local and CI builds, so you can quickly fix problems and debug performance issues. Our DPE University learning path provides a comprehensive introduction to Build Scan, equipping you with the knowledge and skills to effectively analyse and optimize your build processes.

BEST PRACTICES

Forbes: AI Will Transform Software Development—But Not The Way You Expect

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You may not realize it yet, but generative AI is poised to challenge the way we code, build, test, secure, and manage our overall development toolchain. This Forbes article by Steve Rodda, CEO of Ambassador, shares some thoughtful insights starting with this first line:

"AI can write so much code in so little time, it must be making us more productive, right? Maybe not if it isn’t writing the code we need."

So what good is AI providing for—and what damage is it doing to—software organizations leveraging generative AI for developer productivity?

What AI can do well (currently):

• Reproducing work done elsewhere thousands of times (i.e. boilerplate code)

• Replacing manual efforts in areas like setting up authentication, connecting APIs, configuring providers, etc.

• Automatically applying governance rules

What AI doesn't do well (currently):

• Recognizing any sort of context

• Understanding symbolism and analogies

• Performing complex risk analysis 

Bottom line: keeping these current AI restrictions in mind, developers can certainly already benefit from AI-assisted code generation. We’ll see where things go from here.

To ensure you have full observability of what’s going on as AI makes its way into your code base, we invite your team to a guided Develocity trial. Over a period of weeks, you'll work hand-in-hand with our engineers to accelerate your feedback cycles, troubleshoot with more clarity and ease, and get end-to-end observability into your entire toolchain. The best part? You’ll walk away with a proven ROI to share with your organization.

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 engineering leadership. 

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

• Apple  |  San Diego, CA  |  SWE - Developer Experience and Operations - Internal Tools Developer (Build)

• CyberAgent Group  |  Tokyo, Japan  |  Developer Productivity Engineer

• Dropbox  |  Remote  |  Principal Software Engineer

• Hashicorp  |  Remote  |  Manager, Engineering - Productivity Systems & Services

• LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group)  |  London, England  |  Senior Developer Experience Engineer

• MongoDB  |  Berlin, Germany  |  Senior Software Engineer (Internal Developer Platform)

• Netflix  |  Poland  |  Engineering Manager - Developer Enablement Engineering

• Rightmove  |  London, England  |  Platform Engineer (Developer Experience)

• Rippling  |  Seattle, WA  |  Staff Software Engineer - Developer Experience

• Zillow  |  Remote  |  Principal Software Development Engineer, Big Data

• Zoox  |  Foster City, CA  |  Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience Team