Developer productiveness is crucial to Atlassian.
The Australian tech agency includes roughly 5,000 engineers worldwide and is dwelling to quite a lot of globally aggressive software program merchandise for work groups. Its success depends upon partaking builders and delivery nice merchandise.
Nevertheless, Atlassian thinks measuring developer productiveness is ineffective. As a substitute, the corporate prefers to align with a broader initiative to boost developer expertise known as “developer joy.” The thought is straightforward: Completely happy builders will finally be extra productive.
Atlassian’s drawback with measuring developer productiveness
Atlassian believes productiveness is troublesome to measure and might be counterproductive.
In a weblog publish, Andrew Boyagi, DevOps evangelist at Atlassian, mentioned he understands why companies wish to measure developer productiveness. With pressures on IT and enterprise leaders to ship digital merchandise or options or handle digital transformations, these corporations wish to display return on funding in individuals and know-how, he defined.
However he mentioned developer productiveness is troublesome to measure. Common measurements previous and current have included strains of code produced, duties moved to the accomplished column, story factors estimated in a dash or DORA metrics like software program deployment frequency and cycle instances.
Atlassian DevOps advocate Sven Peters mentioned these measures don’t really measure productiveness. He mentioned measurements like strains of code or deployment frequency might be gamed, story factors are estimates and neither measure optimistic outcomes for patrons.
Productiveness measures are additionally problematic contemplating improvement roles now contain rather more than coding and delivery new options. Peters mentioned builders’ cognitive load now contains extra time each operating and constructing the software program.
Developer expertise: A brand new method to increase productiveness?
There’s rising curiosity in how developer expertise impacts productiveness. DevEx focuses on creating the best surroundings for productive work primarily by means of higher instruments and applied sciences, shifting away from DevOps’ emphasis on productiveness instruments and frameworks.
Deloitte named DevEx a prime tech development for 2024. The agency mentioned builders immediately are “in high demand but hindered” by productiveness challenges like configuration, device integration and debugging, which impede actions and options that add worth to their enterprise.
Three parts of Developer Expertise excellence
Evaluation from Deloitte discovered there have been three key parts of an awesome DevEx proposition:
- Platforms and instruments: Fewer numbers of higher, standardised platforms and instruments make it simpler and extra pleasing for builders to work. Harness’ State of Developer Expertise Survey discovered too many instruments in use, growing context switching and slowing onboarding.
- Methods of working and circulation: Nice DevEx wants “clear, continuous processes” so builders can accomplish duties in a “flow” whereas avoiding friction from disconnected techniques or poor governance. This contains superior workforce workflow administration and DevSecOps.
- Expertise expertise: Builders work finest when a part of a “fun, productive and diverse” neighborhood and tradition; are engaged in steady studying; and have probabilities for mobility and profession development by means of steady development and improvement alternatives.
Atlassian’s productiveness method: Maximise ‘developer joy’
Atlassian believes builders who’re pleased and happy with their work are additionally prone to be productive. Which means, reasonably than waste time and sources measuring productiveness, effort is best spent investing in and maximising what it phrases “developer joy.”
Atlassian mentioned developer pleasure has quite a lot of inputs however contains two important components:
- Developer expertise: Atlassian summarises DevEx as being how engineers really feel in regards to the instruments, frameworks and platforms they use to create software program.
- Engineering tradition: Atlassian defines engineering tradition as being “how work gets done.” It contains parts corresponding to organisational values, norms and decision-making.
Atlassian’s Peters provided additional perception into what creates pleasure for Atlassian’s builders, together with:
- Dev high quality: Builders take pleasure in work extra in the event that they concentrate on nice high quality code.
- Dev progress: The power to make progress shortly with out blockers satisfies builders.
- Dev worth: Pleasure and satisfaction come from creating worth and impacting buyer companies.
What does ‘developer joy’ appear like?
Atlassian’s concentrate on creating and measuring developer pleasure has yielded myriad enhancements throughout completely different product groups. As outlined in a presentation given by Peters, these have included initiatives from groups engaged on Atlassian’s JIRA, Confluence and Trello merchandise.
JIRA
Their JIRA groups put in place a set of latest pointers for code opinions in order that receiving suggestions and making code enhancements are extra pleasing for builders. Tips embrace “assuming competence” of the developer and giving constructive, reasoned suggestions.
JIRA product and improvement groups have additionally improved collaboration to keep away from rework. All workforce members are actually concerned at each stage of the lifecycle to various levels — from the product “wonder” section by means of the event and buyer “impact” levels.
Confluence
Atlassian’s Confluence workforce constructed an inner device for detecting “flaky” code checks, which maintain up processing of pull requests. After figuring out a flaky take a look at, the device flags it for overview through an automatic Slack message, so builders should not distracted by time-consuming debugging tangents.
One other workforce diminished the time taken for pull requests to be processed, and the code merged with the principle department from three to 1.2 days. They did this by sending automated reminders to workforce members to overview pull requests within the morning earlier than they began their very own work.
Trello
A Trello workforce devised a technique to combine high quality assurance into their workflow. They created a QA Kick-Off, the place QA assistants inform builders in regards to the exploratory checks they’d conduct. This permits builders to imagine main possession of QA, with assist from the QA assistants.
How IT leaders can enhance their groups’ developer pleasure
Ask builders for options
Atlassian makes it clear that companies, together with tech corporations, critical about enhancing their developer expertise ought to ask builders themselves. Atlassian mentioned builders are greater than prepared to offer suggestions on the issues they’ve to enhance the enjoyment they’ve at work.
Atlassian provides a free Developer Expertise Survey that groups can arrange and run digitally or in-person to measure their developer expertise. The survey may also help to achieve suggestions on parts like “sustainable speed to ship,” “waiting time,” “execution independence” and extra.
Find time for enhancing pleasure
Atlassian determined to release 10% of developer time to permit them to seek out methods to enhance “developer joy” within the enterprise. This sees builders at Atlassian spending about 55% of their time “changing the business” by creating merchandise and options for its prospects, 35% of their time “keeping the lights on” by means of maintenance-style work and 10% of their time on developer pleasure.
Deal with every firm and workforce uniquely
Peters advises DevOps leaders to deal with every firm and workforce as having a singular path to developer pleasure. He mentioned that copying the approaches of different companies or groups might not work. As a substitute, work on enhancing pleasure inside a workforce’s distinctive instruments and processes.
Add context to productiveness metrics
Organisations mustn’t solely depend on the restricted story supplied by productiveness metrics like deployment frequencies. Fairly, they need to search so as to add fuller context to those measures, and add new ones that impression productiveness, like the enjoyment of developer groups.
Developer pleasure could possibly be the longer term for tech expertise
Discovering a tech office that champions pleasure over productiveness measurement might appear to be a dream to builders. In reality, for a lot of builders worldwide working at giant tech corporations, safeguarding wellbeing might be laborious sufficient, not to mention fostering real pleasure in work.
Australia’s Atlassian could also be on to one thing, although. As Boyagi suggests in his Atlassian weblog publish, corporations that target DevEx might outperform opponents, together with attracting prime expertise. “I know which type of company I would prefer to work for,” Boyoagi wrote.