| Welcome to the InfoQ Software Architects’ Newsletter! Each month, we bring you essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies. This month, we again focus on the topic of "Developer Experience and Tooling". The core topics of developer experience (DevEx) currently span across the entire "diffusion of innovation" graph in this year’s Architecture and Design InfoQ Trends Report. We see DevEx and the creation and use of tooling as vital for supporting a range of activities for both architects and developers, from "designing for portability/security/resilience, etc.," to the use of workflow and decision automation platforms, and correctly understanding and operating microservices. Key challenges remain in this space, including being conscious about curating an effective developer experience, the build vs. buy decision with tooling, and how industry standards can influence your day-to-day code, ship, and run workflows. News How Developer Enablement Brings Benefits to Software Organizations Developer enablement is about tools and approaches that can greatly increase the potential we have as individuals. QCon London 2022 hosted a track on developer enablement, and Stuart Davidson, director at Skyscanner, stated that enabling developers can greatly impact productivity and happiness, as well as profits and retention. He also argued that developer tools make it easier for engineers to deploy products, enabling them to focus on building a product. Building on this topic, Kelsey Hightower recently tweeted asking for examples of great developer experience, and the community shared a series of interesting insights in the replies. The Challenges of DevOps and the Importance of Developer Experience with Jyoti Bansal In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jyoti Bansal about the challenges of DevOps today and the importance of developer experience for effective software development today. Key takeaways include: there are too many moving parts and separate pieces in the typical DevOps pipeline today; developer experience is the number one thing that every organization and every engineering team should focus on; and 20% to 30% of developer time is wasted on unnecessary activities, most of which can be automated and achieved using AI tooling. CircleCI Report Finds Successful Software Teams Are Larger and Test Extensively CircleCI, a continuous integration and delivery platform, has released the findings from their 2022 State of Software Delivery Report. The report reveals that the most successful software delivery teams are larger, use extensive testing, and prioritize being ready to deploy. The report’s key findings, in terms of teams and culture, show that the most successful teams routinely meet four key benchmarks identified: duration (lead time), mean time to recovery, success rate, and throughput. Sponsored | | Discover the key concepts of the world's most evolved distributed SQL database with your FREE copy of O'Reilly's CockroachDB: The Definitive Guide. Learn how to architect apps for effortless scale, bulletproof resilience, and low-latency performance for users anywhere. Download your free ebook now. |
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Case Study How the Financial Times Approaches Engineering Enablement With the move to the cloud, the widespread adoption of continuous delivery, and the rise of microservices, it is possible for software development teams to move a lot faster than they could five years ago. But this can only happen if these teams can move at their own speed without having to wait for someone to sign off on a release or process a ticket to spin up a server. Companies still need teams working on infrastructure, tooling, and platforms, but the way they work has to change so that they do not become a bottleneck. These teams need to see their true function as being about enabling product teams to deliver business value. Investment in this area pays off as it speeds up many other teams and allows product-team engineers to focus on solving business problems that provide value to the organization. Sarah Wells spent four years as a tech director at the Financial Times, leading teams focused on engineering enablement. In this article, she presented how the FT teams were set up and the things they discovered that were really important in enabling other teams. Key takeaways included: - Continuous delivery and decoupled architectures, such as microservices, can massively speed up the delivery of value, with code going live in minutes rather than months.
- The key is for product-focused teams to be as autonomous as possible; they should not normally have to wait on other teams for something to happen, whether that is a decision or task execution.
- You still need teams focused on infrastructure, tooling, and platforms, but they need to see themselves as enablers of other teams: the focus is on anything that makes things safer, simpler, and quicker.
- Wherever possible, common engineering capabilities should be self-service, automated, and well-documented.
- Product-focused teams should be able to rely on those capabilities; they need to be maintained for the long term and kept secure and compliant.
This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article written by Sarah Wells, "How the Financial Times Approaches Engineering Enablement". To get notifications when InfoQ publishes content on these topics, follow "developer experience", "tools", and "automation" on InfoQ. Missed a newsletter? You can find all of the previous issues on InfoQ. Sponsored | | Managing multiple clusters puts more pressure on your IT teams, requiring massive time and resource investments. This eBook provides the guidance and tools you need to successfully build and manage applications on Kubernetes, as well as empowering IT administrators and developers to standardize deployments, increase the availability of their applications, and streamline maintenance operations. Download now.
Learn more about this topic in the eBook "Kubernetes Best Practices (By O'Reilly)", sponsored by D2iQ. |
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Upcoming events For practitioners by practitioners
QCon San Francisco (Oct 24-28): 15 preliminary tracks announced. Topics you need to know about.
For senior practitioners by senior practitioners. The QCon San Francisco Program Committee has carefully curated topics based on what matters most now in Software Development. 2022 tracks include Operating Microservices, Green Tech, Change at Scale, Building Modern Backends, MLOps and more. Supercharge your software development & tech leadership skills. Book before June 27 to save $600 with our early bird pricing. Register Now! Senior software developers rely on the InfoQ community to keep ahead of the adoption curve. One of the main reasons software architects and engineers tell us they keep coming back to InfoQ is because they trust the information provided and selected by their peers. We’ve been helping software development teams adopt new technologies and practices for over 15 years through InfoQ articles, news items, podcasts, tech talks, trends reports, and QCon software development conferences. We hope you find this newsletter useful. If not, you can unsubscribe using the link below. Forwarded email? Subscribe and get your own copy. |
