I remember developing my first application — in COBOL (Don’t judge. At least I still have a fallback!).
I’ve long since hung up my developer cleats, but I remain fascinated by the evolution of the development discipline and its ever-rising business criticality. Of course, development was always important, but the ultimate success of an organization rarely hung in its balance.
Today, the opposite is true — even for the most old-school industrial companies, the effectiveness of their development efforts can be the difference between market success and market irrelevance.
And with these continually rising stakes, a new and almost surprising area is rising to the fore: the developer experience. (aka “the other DX”)
I say surprising because, as Ravi Lachhman writes in The New Stack, organizations expected developers to be able to “figure it out.” But, as he continues, “Having poor DX is a detriment to overall engineering efficiency and the ability to innovate and iterate while not adding to technical debt.”
This increasing criticality of development, coupled with the recognition of the importance of the developer experience, is challenging every development team to figure out how to level up their development game. And the unexpected way to do so may be by reimagining developer collaboration.
The Evolution of Developer Collaboration
If the developer experience is the new kid on the block, developer collaboration isn’t too far behind.
The entire idea that developer collaboration is the pathway to productivity and effectiveness is something that is only now gaining full acceptance (and still needs repeating).
Tammy Van Hove, distinguished engineer at IBM, felt compelled to make this point in a recent conversation with Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, “You’re not just locking yourself in an office anymore and writing code and submitting it — you’re collaborating throughout the whole process end-to-end from development to delivery and operating,” she said.
It’s fair to say that this entire collaborative evolution only began twenty years ago, with the rise of Agile. Even then, reaching any form of critical mass took a good decade.
In the last decade or so since, we finally saw the rise of channel-based tools that helped developers communicate. However, these were often single-threaded interactions that opened the door to collaboration, but left most of the heavy lifting to the developers themselves.
The rise of DevOps started to shift things. “The whole DevOps experience [is about] not just writing code and throwing over the wall to somebody…and agile is what really captured my developer mindset where I didn’t have to work for months and spit out a finished product,” said Van Hove. “I could spin and I could iterate and I could do things quickly, and then the whole DevOps model and tool chains to support that really increased velocity. Automation also became a big part of a developer’s experience — where, you know, I’m not going to throw over the wall for someone else to test.”
And DevOps has successfully ushered in these new perspectives on iteration and speed. But it’s also revealed the gap in the developer collaboration paradigm: simple communication is not enough.
As development organizations fully embrace and scale DevOps and other iterative development approaches, they find that manual processes, undigitized workflows, and an inelegant developer experience hold them back. And so, they need to do something about it if they’re going to level up their development effectiveness.
Reimagining the Collaborative Developer Experience
To level-up developer effectiveness and address the roadblocks holding them back, organizations are realizing that they need to reimagine the developer experience using a collaboration-first perspective.
And they’re not alone. Leading providers of technology for the development community, such as Mattermost, are moving in the same direction.
This shift is critical because, as Lachhman points out, the opposite has been true. “Up till now the developer experience has been quite siloed and segregated,” he said.
Instead, he suggests that development teams approach the developer experience the same way an organization might approach a broader user experience effort, focusing on usability, findability, and credibility.
Such a perspective results in an integrated experience that combines the various elements of the developer experience and workflow into a seamlessly integrated whole. This approach necessitates integrating functions such as project management, communications, playbooks, templates, implementation guides, automation, and human-to-human interactions — all the non-coding elements that enable streamlined collaboration and which otherwise consume developer cycles if handled independently.
This collaboration-focused approach to delivering an integrated developer experience is what paves the way for development teams to simultaneously improve efficiency and outcomes. “Good developer experience supports innovation, iteration, safety and velocity,” Lachhman says. “Great developer experience allows developers to focus on and experiment with what is important — and not pick up technical debt with non-functional or application operational concerns (such as scaling and robustness) along the way.”
Of course, the challenge is that most development environments are built for siloed functionality. The trick for development teams is to find a way to bring all the non-coding elements under a single, collaboration-focused roof — and why many of them are turning to platforms, such as Mattermost’s, that take such an approach.
The Intellyx Take: Getting Ahead of the Curve
The collaborative developer experience will be one of the essential drivers of competitiveness for the enterprise.
I realize that’s a bold statement, but it is based on two current and rising trends that we can all see with our own eyes. The first is the sheer demand for development. The technologies that application developers create and support are one of the few remaining levers of innovation and competitiveness. Your ability to attract and retain high enough levels of developer talent is going to be a critical enabler of organizational success.
The quality of the developer experience will be one of the primary enablers of this attraction and retention. Happy developers will equal business competitiveness, plain and simple.
The second trend is the growing velocity of development. It’s not just your ability to turn out technology-powered innovations that will matter. The speed and agility with which you can do so will matter just as much.
Here too, the collaborative capabilities delivered as part of your developer experience will be all-important. By breaking down barriers and bottlenecks, a collaborative experience will enable your organization to rapidly and efficiently turn out those software-based innovations that are the basis for competitive differentiation.
Every organization must now face the hard fact that you’re competing in the experience economy. Your ability to leverage technology as a competitive tool matters more than ever. And it will be those organizations that get ahead of the curve and recognize the critical role the collaborative developer experience plays in that delivery that will come out on top.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. As of the time of writing, Mattermost is an Intellyx customer. None of the other companies mentioned in this paper are Intellyx clients. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this paper.
