Bridging the Developer Experience (DevX) Gap

They say our past experiences have an impact on how we view life and our general outlook. Routine behaviours and patterns become a program that we follow day in, day out. We stop using our minds to their fullest potential and become trapped in unquestioning, continual cycles of process and emotion.

The same could be said of our experiences in the present—our worlds shaped by the environments around us. The people, practices, tools and culture. Only by challenging these accepted patterns can we start to think about changing our mindsets.

DevOps is a mindset; a way of forming an agile relationship between development and operations teams to speed up delivery of software to support business operations and improve customer experience. By and large, it has been successful. Companies react to change more effectively; software is developed and deployed swiftly. It has become a necessity across most organizations.

There are challenges, as we all know, however. The State of DevOps Report 2021 found that 83% of organizations are implementing DevOps practices, but most are still failing to scale adoption. It’s a situation that hasn’t changed for four years. Why? Among other things, the report states there are too many silos, not enough skilled people, a saturated market with too many tools—and a culture that prohibits scale.

Given that the end goal of DevOps is to generate untrammelled innovation across an organization, getting the culture right is critical. Developers need an environment where they have the confidence to innovate and contribute back to their community, help grow the business, improve their skill sets and further their careers without being limited by the people, practices and tools around them.

Above all, it’s about creating the best possible developer experience (DevX) in which to thrive.

The Developer Experience Gap

Stephen O’Grady at Red Monk, the developer-focused analyst firm, originally wrote about a DevX (developer experience) gap in this post back in October 2020.

Stephen likened the experience you get from an iPhone to the expectations of developers. The iPhone’s closed SDK created an environment that allows all developers to work in a consistent way. Functions are tightly integrated so that, for example, it would be easy to ensure the music volume lowers when you receive a call. A basic function, but one that we expect to work seamlessly with any app we install.

Since then, developers have been served a vast array of tools and services with more and more software arriving on a daily basis. The challenge is that, where the phone and music player teams were controlled in a way that would make them work well together, modern development infrastructure doesn’t have that capability. In most cases, the toolchain is a “patchwork quilt” of products and services from different suppliers. And it is up to developers to build and maintain that quilt.

This means that developers are being forced to take time away from writing code—the reason why they are employed in the first place—to dedicate valuable time and resources toward understanding and managing issues associated with highly complex, multi-cloud toolchains that are often being held together by nothing more than sticky tape and string.

In other words, the very same market that is telling developers they can have anything they want to do their jobs more efficiently is simultaneously telling them that piecing the whole thing together is their problem. This is the gap for developers: It’s a gap between expectations and current reality. And a bridge across that gap needs to be built for organizations to get the most out of DevOps.

Delivering the DevX Factor

Attracting the best people is about showing that the experience they will have in your organization is both rewarding and liberating, so expecting developers to spend the bulk of their time not developing is clearly not an optimal experience. Creating better DevX will not only influence your ability to attract new people but enhance your ability to hold on to, empower and upskill the teams you already have.

Where to start? Well, contrary to popular belief, you don’t need an army of DevOps engineers to reach your goals. Instead, you need to empower your existing teams to reach their full DevOps potential, supporting their progress with the right tools and training for their experience and role.

As with any work culture (remote or hybrid), the importance of knowing where to find what you need and how to collaborate with other teams has never been so important. Tooling is a good place to start. DevX is affected by the tools they use, so organizing them in a way that helps with the culture is a step forward. In a multi-cloud, multi-vendor environment, there isn’t going to be one tool that does it all so the key is to allow teams to use the tools they love and automate as much as possible to remove the repetitive tasks.

Automation is also a critical element in the race to reduce time-to-market and improve quality where concepts such as shift left are adding complexity and increasing the responsibilities piled on developers. Having access to testing automation in a consistent way will improve the overall experience for DevOps teams.

And finally, think about starting your DevX journey by using a self-service platform, where information, tooling and automation can be centralized and made available to developers on demand. For overworked specialists, access to a platform that connects to any tool and creates an on demand environment that automates much of the repetitive work will create more time for them to do what they were originally employed to do: Develop.