Developer Experience
Developer experience impacts the success of software projects. Poor developer experiences lead to increased costs, decreased productivity, and delayed releases.
What is Developer Experience?
What is Developer Experience?
The developer experience (devex) is a concept that tries to manage and measure the ease with which it takes to create software within an organisation. It includes all aspects of coding, debugging and testing — as well as any other processes involved in the development process like deployments, and provisioning of non-production and production infrastructure. The developer experience should be tailored to the developer's individual needs, ensuring they have access to the best tools and resources available to complete the job without unnecessary friction or blocking. Organisations must consider elements such as code quality, developer support and overall developer satisfaction when creating a positive developer experience. The goal is to empower developers in their work, helping them achieve their objectives more easily and quickly. By providing a great developer experience, organisations can foster innovation and collaboration, encouraging developers to strive for the best results possible.
Developer experience consists of the following components Tools, Workflows and Processes.
Well managed tooling improves the developer experience if configured correctly.
Automating the many tasks that help refine software improves the developer experience.
Agile software development practices improve the developer experiences when they are used to improve the cadence of software delivery.
Software Development Tools
Tooling improves the developer experience
Tools help automate the development process, they remove the grunt work and enable developers to focus on the problem domain. The most common tool is the CICD server which manages the source code integration as well as automating the build and testing of code. The CICD server is extensible and integrates with thousands of other tools which enables you to customise how you integrate with 3rd parties. The tools alone won't provide a very good developer experience and it is necessary that we leverage the CICD server in a particular way to ensure that it is optimised to provide feedback fast to the developer. In fact CICD servers are commonly the cause for bad developer experiences.
Software Development Automation
Improve software projects by automating refinement stages
Workflows describe the process that code needs to follow in order to refine source code. Workflows are commonly referred to as pipelines but as pipelines are specific to CICD tools we refer to them here as workflows. A developer can have source code in a repository and the repository has a workflow which describes how the source code is built, packaged, tested and deployed to the non-production environment and perhaps even production. There can be as many stages in the workflow as necessary to refine the source code and validate it for production. The workflow can reach from the source code repository through to the production environment and on its journey through the workflow the source code can pass through multiple systems that scan it, analyse it and in the end deploy it to production. Like tools the workflow itself is also commonly the cause for bad developer experiences.
Software Development Processes
Improve software projects with agile practices
Software development processes help reinforce best practice and can improve planning, reliability and collaboration. The developer experience can be impacted by inadequate planning. All software projects are complex to deliver as they include multiple stakeholders and humans have varying degrees of experience communicating their ideas and thoughts.
Agile practices provide idealistic mechanism for communicating what you want from your software and with the right combination of collaboration and task breakdown a team will eventually deliver something that has value.
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