DPE Tour Boston

Aida from the Toast Developer Productivity team shares how she identified bottlenecks that slowed down Toast developers from getting their features into customer’s hands. The DPE initiatives yielded 44% decrease in build/test times, decreased CI queuing, and reduced PR merge times.

It is well known that organizations connect software testing with software quality: making sure that the code does what it is supposed to do. Unfortunately, many organizations believe that the testing is a slow process and it causes stagnancy in the project. Organizations say that due to slow testing process they are not able to meet its set milestones, but it doesn’t have to be this way. The testing stage is also part of the developer experience and making it such that engineers are productive and continue delivering software not only fast but with confidence is crucial. In this talk, we will explore a few approaches that we are taking in order to deliver a more consistent and delightful testing experience for JVM engineers at Netflix. The end goal: speed up engineers feedback loop by running tests locally constantly as much as possible.

Measuring developer productivity is hard. Improving it is even harder. Recent frameworks do an amazing job at the measurement conversation, which explains why so many groups are spinning up dashboards to help their leaders understand productivity. However, these dashboards are often treated as the end-result. I’m here to tell you that dashboards are only a means to an end, and we need to move away from dashboards in order to improve productivity.