Developer Productivity Engineering Blog

DPE Summit is back! The only event dedicated to the practice of Developer Productivity Engineering and Developer Experience will return to The Midway in San Francisco on September 20-21, 2023. Now in its second year, the event hosts leading DPE practitioners from some of the most innovative engineering organizations. In this two-day, dual-track event, DPE and DX leaders from Airbnb, Gradle, LinkedIn, Slack, Spotify, and many more will share their perspectives and practices, success stories, and lessons learned. We’re doubly excited to have JetBrains, Meta, Netflix, and Uber join us as both sponsors and speakers.

In the arena of software development, every metric has its role to play. Among these, local build times hold a position that’s often undervalued. This critical performance indicator may have been sidelined as we transitioned to remote work. It’s time we bring it back into focus, explore its significant impact on the development process, and take action, as necessary, to improve it.

James Ward, Google Developer Advocate at the time, and Mark Vieira, a Principal Software Engineer at Elastic, co-presented a Webinar on how Elastic saves time and spends less on their Google Cloud infrastructure by leveraging Develocity.

The SPACE framework provides a comprehensive model for defining developer productivity drivers. This article explores how the practice of Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) aligns with these drivers.  It concludes that SPACE and DPE need each other.  SPACE defines the “what” for improving developer productivity and DPE defines the “how”.

This is a cautionary tale about the consequences of not investing enough in Developer Experience, what to do about it if you find yourself having to address those consequences, and how to avoid getting into this situation in the first place.

In a recent Inc. Magazine article, “Google Has a Productivity Problem That Has Stumped Managers for 113 Years. Will Sundar Pichai Be the First to Solve It?” (Aug. 2022), Pichai said the tech giant’s productivity levels do not match its growing headcount. Google executives have reportedly said they want to “get better results faster” with the people they have, and employees have been warned to boost performance or “there will be blood on the streets.”

Gradle Inc. announced recently that it closed a $27 million Series C funding round doubling its venture capital investment haul to almost $55 million. This round represents a significant endorsement by the venture community of the emerging software practice called Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE). DPE takes an engineering approach — rather than a people management approach — to solving developer productivity challenges and improving the developer experience. 

Develocity is positioned as a key enabling technology for DPE and the only technology that provides an end-to-end solution. To date venture firms investing in DPE include Bain Capital Partners, DCVC, Harmony Partners, Triangle Peak Partners, StepStone Group, and True Ventures. 

What does the smart money see in DPE?

For decades, the success formula for many (if not all) breakthrough business and technology productivity methodologies has been “Productivity = Speed * Efficiency”, where “efficiency” in this case refers to the ability to maintain or even improve quality as process and workflow execution speed up.

If some of the most important open source projects in the world are any indication, Develocity is quickly emerging as a staple for build and test data analytics and as a source of acceleration technology for both Gradle and Maven-based builds. Spring, JetBrains (Kotlin), JUnit, and not surprisingly, Gradle Build Tool, all rely on Develocity to improve build and test feedback cycle times and make troubleshooting more efficient with root cause analysis data (Build Scans) and failure analytics. Here’s a brief summary of the role Develocity is playing in each project and some high-level results.