This month’s newsletter hits hard on flaky tests, invites you to the July 11th Lowdown with Red Hat Quarkus, shares how 20 companies got their DevProd projects funded, and welcomes the FULL speaker lineup for DPE Summit 2024 (Sep 24-25 in SF), as well as DPE University’s first 1,500 learners. Got questions? Email me at owhite@gradle.com, and have a productive month!
 

FEATURED UPCOMING EVENT

TOMORROW |  Learn how the Red Hat Quarkus team cut Maven PR times by 3X with Develocity 

Cutting build times by 75% is game-changing. Are you interested in learning how it happened?

 

Join us Thursday, July 11th, to get the lowdown on how the Quarkus team at Red Hat shaved 3 hours off their 4-hour Maven build using Develocity Build Cache. Guillaume Smet, Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, will share the story of the Quarkus team’s journey to faster and more stable builds. 

 

Discussion topics include: 

  • What is Quarkus?

  • How Quarkus does builds and tests

  • Getting insights into CI, builds, and tests to identify and prioritize bottlenecks

  • Enabling and optimizing the Develocity Maven build cache

  • Customizing Github Actions reports with Build Scan data

  • Flaky test management with Surefire and Develocity’s Test History

Bonus: Develocity now offers a FREE custom Maven extension to make Quarkus build goals cacheable! This means that all Quarkus users can save hours of build time.

 
Register for JUL-11

EXPERT TAKES

How DO top banks handle flaky tests?

Ever wonder how banks with trillions of dollars in assets approach the universal challenge of flaky tests? 

 

As you're probably aware, a flaky (or intermittent or non-deterministic) test is a test that—given the same code, the same inputs, and the same environment—sometimes passes and sometimes fails. 

 

Organizations that prioritize quality will have more tests, and more tests mean a greater likelihood that some of those tests will be flaky. Scale this out to millions of tests per day, and we can begin to see the problem. 

 

That’s why we’re sharing our conversation with developer productivity experts at four large financial organizations—U.S. Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase—about how they address flaky tests by making it part of their organizational mindset.

 
Read more

BEST PRACTICES

How Uber took on the challenge of flaky tests

In the previous section, we looked at how some of the largest financial institutions handle flaky tests. Now, let’s turn to Uber.

 

Imagine deploying code that may or may not contain a major problem—that's the reality of flaky tests. Flaky tests are often overlooked or ignored, but this simply accumulates technical debt and delays development. Uber experienced this firsthand when its flaky tests, seemingly minor annoyances, snowballed into a major threat that eroded developer trust and slowed innovation. 

 

In this article by Xiaoyang Tan, Yushan Lin, and Sergey Balabanov of Uber’s Development Platform team, you’ll learn the technical details of Uber's flaky test remediation efforts with Testopedia, their in-house tool built for the single purpose of tracking and contextualizing all tests. 

 

The main takeaway is that investing in robust testing practices isn't just about finding bugs—it's about fostering developer trust and ensuring a smooth, efficient development process.

 
Read the article

DPE DATA POINT

How Revolut cut build times by 75% for complex Android projects

In light of a rapidly growing codebase, financial services unicorn Revolut faced a nasty impact on time-to-market due to difficulty in managing the growth of build and test cycles. Read about how they turned the tide.

 
Learn more

TRAINING AND EDUCATION

DPE University welcomes its first 1,500 learners!

We’re thrilled to welcome the first 1,500 course participants to DPE University! In less than 6 weeks, we’ve reached this exciting milestone.

 

DPE U offers 10 free, self-paced courses on Gradle, Apache Maven, Develocity, and DPE, with more courses to be released in the coming months. 

 

Courses are presented by the Gradle training team, including Java Champions Trisha Gee, Brian Demers, and Baruch Sadogursky. Join our community of learners and start your developer productivity journey today. 

 

P.S. All learning paths provide certificates upon completion so you can share your achievements! 

 
Go to DPE University

IDEAS & INSIGHT

Learn how these 20 companies got their DevProd initiatives funded

DPE Showdown guest and DPE Summit speaker Abi Noda (co-founder of DX), published this interesting article for his weekly Substack newsletter that touched on something sensitive to many dev teams.

 

Once you get buy-in for your developer productivity initiative, how do you get money, people, and time to actually make it happen? 

 

He compares feedback from 20 different companies that have Developer Productivity teams or initiatives in place, asking what tipped the scales in favor of funding DevProd and making it a first-class citizen. 

 

And guess what? It almost always boiled down to a specific project. Top-ranked projects focused on CI/CD tooling and removing bottlenecks, followed by optimization projects for cloud infrastructure and development environments. It’s a helpful and well-written article, and we recommend you read it.


You can also see more of Abi in our latest DPE Showdown, where he joins other experts from Microsoft, Spotify, and Uber to talk productivity metrics.

 
Watch DPE Showdown

DPE SUMMIT 2024

Full speaker lineup released, early-bird prices end in August!

With our popular DPE City Tour circuit ending in Washington D.C. on July 18th, it’s time to turn our full attention to DPE Summit–September 24-25 in San Francisco! 

 

If you’re still on the fence about coming, take a look at the full speaker lineup and get impressed. You’ll learn from and network with developer productivity experts from Airbnb, Atlassian, Google, JetBrains, LinkedIn, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, and Uber, to name just a few!

 

Reminder: Early-bird ticket prices end August 18, and hotel rooms close to the venue are in short supply. Don’t wait any longer to save your spot!

 
Register for DPE Summit 2024

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

DPE Job Openings

The industry needs you! You might find your dream role among these job openings related to DPE, developer productivity, and platform engineering. 

 

NOTE: These postings are active at the time of sending but are subject to change.
Summit talk) covering how 17 companies implement DPE tools and practices. Whether you are small, medium, or large, there are examples of DPE structures, terminology, and practices for comparison:

 

Google

  • Size: Large, 100,000 developers 

  • Terminology used:  Engineering Productivity, Developer Intelligence

  • What they measure: Speed, Ease, Quality 

LinkedIn

  • Size: Medium, 10,000 developers 

  • Terminology used:  Productivity and Happiness, Developer Insights, Developer Experience Index

  • What they measure: Developer Net User Satisfaction (NSAT), Developer Build Time, Code Reviewer Response Time, Post-Commit CI Speed, CI Determinism, Deployment Success Rate 

Peloton 

  • Size: Small, 3,000 developers

  • Terminology used:  Tech Enablement, Developer Experience 

  • What they measure: Engagement, Velocity, Quality, Stability

The article contains more details naturally, but the main takeaways conclude that “DORA and SPACE metrics are used selectively” (mainly by Microsoft, the author of the SPACE framework), that qualitative metrics measuring the developer experience itself are frequently used, and that the cognitive load of regular interruptions is highly detrimental to developer “focus time”, a metric tracked more widely than originally expected.

 

See how your team’s DPE initiatives compare

DPE QUIZ

Which of the following is NOT a focus of Developer Productivity Engineering tools and practices?

a) Internal developer surveys

b) Failure analytics dashboards

c) Lines of code written over time

d) Build caching to eliminate extra work

e) Test distribution to speed up tests

 

p.s. answer is at the bottom of this page

 

EXPERT TAKES

Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Spotify share how they’re measuring developer productivity

You may recall that last month we published all the videos and slides from DPE Summit 2023. But with over 40 presentations available to explore, where should you start? 

 

Well, one topic that comes up again and again within software organizations—and was therefore a common discussion point at DPE Summit—is how to effectively measure developer productivity. Is it DORA? Is it internal surveys? Is it custom dashboards? Or something else entirely? 

 

In the section above we saw Gergely Orosz break this down, but to learn exactly how Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Spotify tackle the challenges of DPE metrics, check out these videos: 

So if you missed DPE Summit 2023, watch these videos and stay tuned for announcements about DPE Summit 2024, which will take place September 24-25, 2024 in San Francisco. Event registration opens soon…

 
Watch DPE Summit 2023 sessions

INDUSTRY NEWS

Red Hat doubles down on IDPs, introducing a new developer platform based on Spotify's Backstage

The old saying used to go “No one gets fired for buying IBM”. Now that Big Blue and Red Hat joined forces, is it fair to say that where Red Hat goes the software industry will follow?

 

It depends. 

 

Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) are proving to be increasingly valuable for not only developer productivity but also developer onboarding. In his recent DPE Summit talk, Lee Mills revealed that Backstage users at Spotify have reduced their “time to 10th PR” for new hires from 66 days to 22 days and that Backstage users are 2.3x more active on GitHub than non-users.

 

Red Hat is not an organization to miss an opportunity like this—they describe their new Developer Hub as designed to “provide IT organizations with an extensible instance of Backstage for Kubernetes environments to improve developer productivity”.

 

While it’s clearly meant as an on-ramp for Red Hat products like OpenShift, Quarkus, and Ansible, this showcases the extensibility and customizations possible using Backstage as a flexible foundation for developer productivity initiatives. 

 

Red Hat promoting and contributing to a product like Backstage is a good sign, and we’re interested to see what kind of uptake it gets among users. Read the full article by Mike Vizard for more details.

 
Read the article

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

DPE Job Openings

The industry needs you! You might find your dream role among these job openings related to DPE, developer productivity, and platform engineering. 

 

NOTE: These postings are active at the time of sending but are subject to change.

 

Quiz Answer:

c) Lines of code written over time

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