3 Key Themes To Take Away From the First-Ever DPE Summit
Learn the key themes that emerged from the recently held DPE Summit.
Gradle recently hosted the Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) Summit, where speakers from several recognizable technology and business brands discussed the emerging practice of DPE in detail. Wayne Caccamo, VP of corporate & product marketing, Gradle, shares the key themes that emerged from the Summit.
Earlier this month, Gradle hosted the first-ever Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) Summit for two days in San Francisco. The event, which focused on the emerging practice of DPE, featured an all-star roster of speakers from many of the most recognizable technology and business brands, including Airbnb, Amazon, American Express, Apple, DoorDash, Google, JetBrains, LinkedIn, Meta, Netflix, and Uber.
DPE is a software development practice used by leading organizations across industries to maximize developer productivity and happiness. As its name implies, DPE takes an engineering approach to improve developer productivity. As such, it relies on automation, actionable data, and acceleration technologies to deliver measurable outcomes like faster feedback cycles and reduced resolution time for build and test failures.
The event brought together software development stakeholders from all over the world that share a passion for the DPE approach, which focuses on engineered solutions for developer productivity and developer experience challenges. This contrasts with the traditional approach that views productivity as a “people” challenge and a problem that can be best addressed by management decrees and best practices.
Hans Dockter, Gradle founder and CEO, presented the opening keynote address on the neuroscience of developer productivity. The session provided a thought-provoking take on the psychological impact and “cognitive fatigue” associated with common software development bottlenecks, such as waiting for builds and tests to complete, debugging code, and dealing with test failures. Additional keynotes were delivered by Adam Rogal from DoorDash on “Why DPE is Needed Now More than Ever” and Michael Bailey from American Express on “Communicating for Productivity.”
Overall, the event was buzzing with the active participation of software development team leaders and executives, engineers responsible for builds, productivity, DevOps, and CI, as well as developer experience professionals. For those of you who couldn’t attend the event in person, here are the key themes:
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From Best Practices To Next Practices
One of the major themes throughout this event was the sharing of “next” practices rather than best practices. A best practice codifies what has worked in the past to provide guidance on what to do next. It looks backward for guidance on navigating the future and is characterized by incremental change and results.
A next practice, in contrast, assumes the world is changing so fast that the lessons learned from what has worked in the past are obsolete, or at least a lot less relevant, by the time a best practice is implemented. And given the pace of change in customer preferences, technology, business models, and economic conditions, DPE Summit presenters focused on the next practices aimed at creating the future of software development and the developer experiences through transformational, rather than incremental, change. Many presentations reflected this theme, as well as the central role of experimentation and innovation in taking this approach.
Two sessions, in particular, illuminated next-practice thinking. Netflix shared how they accelerated their build through a more integrated build and CI process and by concentrating on the local development loop. LinkedIn discussed how their team built a new remote development experience in the Cloud that helped reduce the initial setup and build times from 10-30 minutes to just 10 seconds.
Leveraging Modern Technologies To Transform the Developer Experience
There were several deep-dive presentations focused on the advanced technologies driving DPE forward. This included talks from Gradle on build-performance acceleration technologies, such as test distribution and ML-based predictive test selection. These sessions highlighted the massive impact that next-practice thinking and experimentation can have in delivering innovative solutions to developer productivity bottlenecks and developer experience problems.
For example, Uber discussed the modern tools they use to improve developer productivity and ship reliable apps while working on some of the largest mobile apps in the world. LinkedIn’s Developer Insights team has turned to next-practice telemetry sources, data science, and AI models to identify and prioritize bottlenecks that need attention. Meta talked about how generated code overtook the software repository and slowed down their developers and the modern technologies they leveraged to reduce the pain.
Mainstreaming DPE: Journeys, Success Stories, and Lessons Learned
Leaders from household-name brands like Airbnb, Apple, and Google spoke about their success stories and experiences practicing DPE and scaling it across their organizations. They reflected on the process, lessons learned, and the DPE practice’s impact on their business.
It was clear that many organizations represented by the speakers and attendees of the Summit continue to experience the dark costs which DevOps has not accounted for that lie in the process of developing the software itself. The toolchain, of course, is software and subject to the same performance, reliability, and quality challenges as any other piece of software. As a result, significant pitfalls remain in our modern SDLC and DevOps approach. For example, a tremendous amount of waste is created by avoidable delays in receiving feedback. And there is a lack of basic build and test performance and failure observability data that could facilitate problem root cause analysis and prevent problems from happening in the first place.
It was inspiring to see how companies came together at the Summit to discuss and collaborate on how best to address this next set of challenges. The many success stories shared reinforced the sentiment that there is no time like the present to improve developer productivity and the developer experience and make the speed at which companies can deliver quality software at scale a competitive advantage. After witnessing the energy and passion of this inventive and forward-looking community, many of whom traveled great distances to convene, it is reasonable to conclude that DPE might just be the next big thing in software since the introduction of Agile and DevOps.
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