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DevEx: What Drives Productivity

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Re: DevEx: What Drives Productivity

#11

Post by brutusborn »

xwowsersx wrote: post #5

> Developer experience focuses on the lived experience of developers and the points of friction they encounter in their everyday work. I know this is captious of me, but I never understood this phrase "lived experience". As opposed to..? Is there another kind of experience?

I think people mostly use it as a pretentious way to say “self reported experience” or “data from living people.” Things that are based on personal experience (anecdata) and perception rather than anything tangible. Which is important data to consider but often not very useful since perceptions are coloured by beliefs. Using case studies of personal experiences can also be biased towards more extreme experiences or perceptions that are outside the norm.

I have heard of someone describing their “lived experience” of discrimination. They perceived discrimination in many situations where they had no evidence that the other party wasn’t impartial. But often the implication is that “lived experience” represents some form of truth that cannot be questioned.

Re: DevEx: What Drives Productivity

#12

Post by brutusborn »

I only skimmed the article, but I couldn’t see any tangible measures? Even the KPIs seem to be based on perceptions.

Would it be possible to also include data on value of software created? Maybe use historical sales data to map development effort to revenue? Maybe there’s situations where developer experience is optimal (lots of freedom, no meetings, personal project budgets) but limited commercially useful work gets done.

Re: DevEx: What Drives Productivity

#13

Post by brutusborn »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #8

The article begins with: Engineering leaders have long sought to improve the productivity of their developers ... A goal every organization can support, no doubt. What the rest of the article fails to discuss is how upstream-processes determine developer productivity far more than the three dimensions identified. To wit, the clarity and focus of "what and why" for an effort determines the "how and when." Which makes…

I agree the types of data they consider could be widened.

How would you quantify how much “what and why” has been defined? Some kind of diff between the planned architecture or requirements on day 0 and the final codebase?

Re: DevEx: What Drives Productivity

#14

Post by hliyan »

I posted this comment in response to the previous submission [1] of this same "paper":

Also note that the prior work they repeatedly cite (no less than 5 times in as many paragraphs, and indirectly referenced several times in relation to the 20+ "sociotechnical factors"), i.e. reference number (9), is based on "semi-structured interviews with 21 developers". While a lot of the observations and recommendations are correct (and are obvious to any seasoned engineering manager), this seems like an academic exercise in picking three somewhat disparate aspects of development and trying to fit them into a geometric shape (an equilateral triangle) and then calling it a framework.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36006561

Re: DevEx: What Drives Productivity

#15

Post by ltbarcly3 »

lol @ ebay and DevEx. (one of the examples in the article) When I was there (up to 2017) the team that made the internal web framework, Raptor, refused to let anyone see the source code. I mean people that worked at the company, they wouldn't let people sitting 15 feet from them see the source code to the web framework that they used all day to work. Of course you could easily see it in any Java IDE, but they didn't seem to know that. Another team was merging branches by copying the entire source tree and going through the files one by one and manually merging changes in. eBay had been 100% on git/github for over 5 years at that point, nobody on the team had ever learned how branches work, and they had managed to never have anyone tell them either. There had been about 17 large initiatives to fix the MyEbay pages, since every tab was implemented on a different generation of web framework, going all the way back to one that worked entirely via XSLT and merging xml documents which had been retired for well over a decade at that point. All of the efforts failed, and I just checked and my eBay is still using multiple generations of web framework spanning decades. This wouldn't be such a big deal except they don't have the competence left in the company to update the styling so as you click through tabs the page changes from reactive to fixed width to %width depending on what you are looking at. (try it, go to myEbay and click eBay Bucks, or click Messages) They can't even get the color scheme aligned. Again, if they said 'nobody cares' that's just prioritization, but I know that this has been attempted at least 5 times with teams of a dozen people spending up to a year on it. There isn't some secret complexity that thwarts them, it's just an organization that is politically driven and leadership that is more interested in harassing journalists than the business of the company. eBay's DevEx was bad, but their DevCompetence was shocking.

Re: DevEx: What Drives Productivity

#17

Post by currio »

xwowsersx wrote: post #5

> Developer experience focuses on the lived experience of developers and the points of friction they encounter in their everyday work. I know this is captious of me, but I never understood this phrase "lived experience". As opposed to..? Is there another kind of experience?

Second hand experience (vicarious)

Re: DevEx: What Drives Productivity

#18

Post by AdieuToLogic »

brutusborn wrote: post #13
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #8

The article begins with: Engineering leaders have long sought to improve the productivity of their developers ... A goal every organization can support, no doubt. What the rest of the article fails to discuss is how upstream-processes determine developer productivity far more than the three dimensions identified. To wit, the clarity and focus of "what and why" for an effort determines the "how and when." Which makes…

I agree the types of data they consider could be widened. How would you quantify how much “what and why” has been defined? Some kind of diff between the planned architecture or requirements on day 0 and the final codebase?

> How would you quantify how much “what and why” has been defined?

Has been defined or needs to be? I'll assume the latter for sake of discussion.

When skeletal feature specifications can be coded against requirements such that stakeholders and engineers can have a meaningful discussion of the functional expectations (as captured by the specs), along with the engineers having enough understanding to perform impact analysis on the existing system (if any). This is usually an iterative process engaged before any significant implementation is undertaken.

Essentially, the upstream-processes I reference regard establishing a shared understanding. As such, most delivery metrics are not relevant at this point. However, an important benefit is that unneeded effort is often identified and not engaged.

> Some kind of diff between the planned architecture or requirements on day 0 and the final codebase?

In general, system architecture and code bases exist in the "how", not in the "what and why." At a macro (business) level, sometimes architecture decisions such as whether or not to use a cloud provider or data centers do influence the "what."

It's kind of like branching in a programming language. Typically, the earlier an execution flow is determined, the less are needed later. So, too, the sooner stakeholders clearly define "what and why", the less effort is needed to identify "how."

Re: DevEx: What Drives Productivity

#20

Post by PeterStuer »

I can tldr this as "give devs better tools and get out of the way", but boy, this 'paper' is a tedious read. If they would dump all the pretentious language and just say "hey, we asked some devs what they would like and here's the gist of what they said", then shorten this blog post 10x, it would be better. Sometimes you wish authors would use GPT-4.
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