A way to improve developer experience is by removing time-consuming tasks and bottlenecks from developers and from the platform team that supports them. How you introduce changes matters; creating an understanding of the "why" before performing a change can smoothen the rollout.
Jessica Andersson spoke about improving developer experience in a small organization at NDC Oslo 2023.
Andersson explained that developer experience includes all the things that a software developer does in their work for developing and maintaining software, such as writing the code, testing, building, deploying, monitoring, and maintaining:
I often think of this from a product perspective where a development team is responsible for the product life cycle. A good developer experience allows a developer to focus on the things that make your product stand out against the competition and deliver customer value.
Their strategy for increasing developer experience has been to remove time-consuming tasks and bottlenecks. They started out by unblocking developers. If a developer has to wait for someone outside their team in order to make progress, then they are not able to act as an autonomous team and take full ownership of their product life cycle, Andersson said.
Next, they looked at removing time-consuming tasks from the platform team. In order to be able to continue delivering a better developer experience to their developers they needed to make sure that the platform team wasn’t stuck in an endless upgrade and migration loop.
After having freed up time from the platform team, they shifted the focus to removing time-consuming tasks from the developers leading to an overall better developer experience.
Andersson mentioned that how you introduce changes matters and it’s easier to apply changes if you have created an understanding of the "why" before you do so. They introduced a quite different workflow for developers that they believed would be a great improvement, but met some resistance in adoption before the developers understood why and how it was an improvement:
In the long run, it turned into a very appreciated way of working, but the rollout could have gone smoother if we spent more effort on introducing the change before performing it.
You need to build the confidence with developers that you will deliver value to them, Andersson said. Having a good relationship with your developers is key to understanding their problems and how you can improve their daily lives, she concluded.
InfoQ interviewed Jessica Andersson about improving the developer experience.
InfoQ: What challenges did you face improving developer experience while being on a small team?
Jessica Andersson: We couldn’t do everything, and we couldn’t do it all at once. We aimed to take on one thing, streamline it and do it well, and once it was "just working" we could move on to the next thing.
We also had to be mindful of the dependencies we brought on and the tools we started using, everything needs to be kept up-to-date and there’s a real risk of ending up in a state of constant updates with no room for new improvements.
InfoQ: Can you give an example of how you improved your developer experience?
Andersson: For unblocking developers we had the context of using DNS for service discovery. DNS was handled manually and there were just two people who had access to Cloudflare, of which I was one. This meant that every time a developer wanted to deploy a new service or update or remove an existing one, they had to come to me and ask for help.
This was not ideal for how we wanted to work so we started looking into how we could handle this differently in the Kubernetes environment we were using for container runtime. We looked at the ExternalDNS project which allows for managing DNS records through Kubernetes resources.
For us it was really simple to get up and running and fairly easy to migrate the existing, manually-created DNS records to be tracked by ExternalDNS as well. Onboarding developers to the new process was quick and we saw clear benefits within weeks of switching over!
InfoQ: What benefits can a golden path or paved road provide for developers?
Andersson: It allows developers to reuse a golden path for known problems, for instance using the same monitoring solution for different applications. Another benefit is keeping the cognitive load lower; by applying the same way of doing things to different applications, it becomes easier to maintain many applications.
InfoQ: What’s your advice to small teams or organizations that want to improve developer experience?
Andersson: My strongest advice is to assess your own organization and context before deciding on what to do. Figure out where you can make an impact on developer experience, pick one thing and improve it! Avoid copying what others have done unless it also makes sense in your context.