The Developer Experience

First, we had two problems to solve at scale: stop adding more technical debt to the code base and reducing it bit by bit for every release. To deliver higher-quality software, which is the goal of killing the bug mountain, we also needed to help build in healthier behavioral nudges and create a frictionless experience for our engineers.?

Now, what Uber did to the transportation industry (instead of searching for the car, the car comes to you) we’re doing for our software development. Information and actions are being brought to a developer’s attention at the right time in the right proportion by nudging healthy behavior with a near zero-time context switch regardless of the role they play.??

We also started to explore our developer workflow digitization journey to achieve our apex goal of finding a way to create space/time efficiency for developers to deliver features at a higher velocity—without sacrificing quality.??

As part of this journey, we’re transforming our people, processes, tools, and technology. This includes self-disrupting 10 to 100x to deliver unprecedented visibility, automation, effectiveness, efficiency, and alignment for all functions and personas across our entire product development lifecycle.?

We looked at big friction points to determine what was preventing us from performing consistently and predictably at scale. It’s these areas that we’re digitizing first to automatically arm our developers and testers with what they need when they need it to continue to innovate.?

?Some of the key areas we’re working on include:?

• A way for our developers to seamlessly consume and run all relevant tests from different teams associated with a code change to drive left-shift quality.??
• A means for our developers to elastically scale resources for their workspace or test setup (for instance, elastically scaling at will for different configuration and topology, not just for physical, but also for virtual or simulator-based setup).?
• Combining the above two bullet points without developers worrying about them, thus enabling them to just focus on their code.?
• Left-shifting the machine-assist features to nudge healthy developer behaviors in their environment of choice (for example, an Integrated Developer Environment [IDE]).?
• Making an IDE where both information and actions are integrated to accelerate developer zone time and reduce context switch.?
• And much more.?

Over the coming months, I’ll share our progress in each of these areas. Some of the topics I’ll cover will include Testing as a Service (TaaS), Lab as a Service (LaasS), Smart Build/Workflow/Sanity/Coverage/Regressions, Traffic Generation (TReX), and more on IDE.?

I look forward to a lively exchange of thoughts and ideas about our approach to being multipliers in our efforts to solve big problems. Meanwhile, I’m excited about our progress as we continue on this important journey.?

Share your comments below. Happy to have a dialogue!