DOES 2023 Las Vegas: Nicole Forsgren: DevEx Essentials: Igniting Results

As content becomes available from DOES 2023 Las Vegas I will be posting links to some of my favorite talks along with my notes and a summary.

First up is Dr. Nicole Forsgren's great talk on DevEx Essentials: DevOps Enterprise Summit: DevEx Essentials: Igniting Change, Delivering Results

?I really loved this talk.? Dr. Forsgren always provides fantastic insight into what truly drives high performance.

?Nicole's talk built upon the great research from Accelerate and the SPACE Framework: The SPACE of Developer Productivity - ACM Queue

?Gene highlighted that this paper is one of the most cited articles in ACM history.

?Nicole continues to bring together some of the best research into what drives high performance and productivity in software and organizations.

?She starts by highlighting the "DevEx is hotness" but also that "AI & LLM's is hotness".? She goes on to educate us that "You can't actually ship your generative AI unless you can actually ship software."?

Basically: Make sure you are great at both the fundamentals of shipping software (DORA technical practices) and DevEx before layering on more software you can't get out the door in a healthy way.? Organizations like to chase the next shiny thing, but how often do we step back and ask if we are doing the basics well?

DevEx at its core is the satisfaction with the tools and processes and what it takes to deliver code and what it takes do our work as developers.? It's not just about tools!

Nicole then gives us a look at the 3 dimensions of DevEx: FLOW STATE, COGNITIVE LOAD and FEEDBACK LOOPS.

Note that doing well in these 3 dimensions is not just about making developers happy (although a good goal).? But doing well here also helps improve the performance of our teams with better code quality and also our organizations through innovation, hitting our goals and profit.

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The metrics she highlights are impressive.? Improving flow allows for a 50% increase in deep work. Reducing cognitive load improves code understandability 42%.? Fast feedback loops in code reviews increase innovation 20%.

Nicole then goes on to cover the Microsoft Engineering Thrive initiative.? This initiative has become a great opportunity to surface conversations about the DevEx culture at Microsoft and invite engineering leaders to be curious.? It helps teams and leaders think about the tradeoffs and strategies to improve.

The Thrive initiative anchors on the pillars of Speed, Ease and Quality and adds in special measurements for Culture. Nicole notes that there is not ONE METRIC but rather several metrics in the durable categories that evolve over time.? She also emphasizes that there is no benchmark or comparison across teams or companies.? You should only be comparing against yourself and planning out where you want to go. This builds a culture and conversation around embracing change. This creates new opportunities about both what to improve and how.

Any talk these days would not be complete without diving into AI and Nicole finishes with a peek at some of the amazing work Microsoft is thinking about here and how to improve the developer experience.? How many times as a developer have you struggled understanding new code?? How about the build or environments?? How many hours do you spend pinging colleagues or searching Wikis for that elusive answer to debug and understand a task you were assigned?? These are the types of things that Microsoft is looking to solve with AI.

Microsoft is looking to engineer LLMs that help improve DevEx in the areas of: Consultant, Tech Lead and Data Scientist.

These LLMs would help answer many of the questions that developers struggle with daily in their work.? Things like: Who has improved the build? How does the build work?? What does this code do?? How long do PRs take?

As you can imagine, these insights can start to greatly lift the cognitive load of developers and teams and lead to great overall satisfaction and improvement.

Overall, this was a fantastic talk and Nicole was as insightful as ever.? It was packed with real data and insights into what really drives performance.? It also gave us a glimpse into what the future of AI assisted DevEx will look like.

Remember: to be great at AI, you better be great at shipping software first.

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