What Can You Discover If You Just Look?
We need observability on the path to production to gather the data to identify bottlenecks and friction in the tools and processes developers use. This means having visibility into developers’ local development environments and the staging environments (including CI) that the code goes through before finally being deployed to production. These environments are the production environments for creating software, and without visibility into what’s happening here, we don’t know what blockages or security issues are on there.
What differentiates DPE from other related disciplines? It’s the “E” for “Engineering”. DPE uses engineering practices to identify and address issues like these. An engineering approach means:
- Formulating hypotheses
- Gathering data to support or reject the hypotheses
- Acting upon the data
Having observability on our path to production is fundamental to gathering the data required for this approach, and even enables us to identify problems we weren’t aware of. During this keynote, Hans will show examples of how this works in practice.
