Build and Beyond: The State of Developer Experience
Hi, I’m Nick Durkin, CTO for Harness and a Founding Member of EngineeringX. For those unfamiliar, EngineeringX is a dynamic, global community of Engineering Leaders who meet regularly to talk about pivotal software engineering trends and topics.
I’m excited to share the first edition of Build and Beyond. In this new LinkedIn newsletter, I interview one of our EngineeringX community members to get their perspectives on the key topics shaping our industry.
Our inaugural interview is with Damian Ng, SVP of Technology at Anywhere Real Estate Inc. Damian leads Anywhere’s technological innovation investments that encourage open platform connectivity, simplicity, and productivity for its diverse stakeholders.
In his role, developer experience is crucial to driving organizational productivity. Damian was kind enough to shed light on the best practices and strategies he employs at Anywhere.
Here’s a look into our in-depth discussion:
How can companies better support developers in adopting new tools and technologies more efficiently?
New tools and technologies are introduced daily. Our approach involves piloting with a small group of senior engineers to gather feedback before wider adoption. For instance, when piloting coding assistant AI tools, we had engineers test multiple options, rate them, and write up their experiences. We also defined metrics to support our business case once a tool was chosen for broader use.
We rely on the community of developers within our company to make suggestions, and drive new tool adoption. These decisions aren’t made by job title. This allows senior engineers to champion new tools while my role is to facilitate business cases and funding.
What strategies can organizations implement to streamline tool usage and reduce inefficiencies?
Organizations typically use a large number of tools due to personal preferences and the competing pressures of their company's software ecosystem.
While we try to be flexible with tools, some like code repositories, are non-negotiable. The challenge lies in the ecosystem where multiple vendor tools are integrated across product management, coding, testing, and release, often causing inefficiencies due to their semi-open designs.
For many, streamlining tool usage can enhance productivity and operational excellence. However, for enterprises built through mergers and acquisitions, like ours, consolidating tools is costly and doesn't always yield clear benefits. Our strategy focuses on consolidating repositories for code, documents, and user stories to obtain consolidated metrics and improve execution, while keeping ancillary tools flexible.
The 2024 Harness State of Developer Experience Report found that 60% of organizations have release cycles that take months or quarters to deploy code. What do you think are the biggest barriers to more frequent deployments?
There are contributing factors, but the most common include business readiness, application scope, automation levels, and story size.
Traditional IT applications often involve business change management processes that aim to minimize disruption. Older, larger applications have wider testing scopes and often require significant manual effort due to their monolithic nature. To address this, ongoing efforts focus on breaking down monolithic applications into smaller, more manageable components like APIs or UI elements, enabling more automated testing.
Additionally, insufficient automated testing and deployment pipelines raise the bar for regression testing. This may not be as critical for smaller applications, but larger applications face scalability challenges. In some cases, entire sprints are dedicated to testing before release due to the application's complexity. Teams also struggle with overly complex user stories, resulting in excessive work in progress and delayed value delivery.
How can organizations transition from long release cycles to more agile, continuous deployment practices?
Organizations can transition by focusing on breaking down barriers such as automation and creating smaller, more manageable components. One key practice is decoupling deployment from release, allowing rapid deployment with features turned off until they're activated. This approach requires balancing timing to avoid deploying features that aren't immediately valuable, and building trust with business stakeholders to embrace frequent changes.
How can security and development teams collaborate effectively to balance security with rapid deployment?
Our security team is integral to our software quality efforts. We focus on automation and education: automating code vulnerability checks and establishing SLAs for resolving high-priority issues. We also promote education and evangelism by cultivating security champions within our engineering teams. Security, quality, and craftsmanship are non-negotiable and require collaboration across the organization.
Looking ahead, what trends do you see shaping developer experience?
The adoption of AI-assisted coding tools is a significant trend that will reshape the developer experience, operational models, and how we structure engineering organizations. Our internal pilots have shown productivity gains in automating routine tasks, though we still rely on senior engineers to validate AI outputs before merging code. As we continue to leverage these tools, I anticipate they will become a game changer for many companies.
How should organizations prepare for these changes to stay ahead and maintain a competitive edge?
Each organization faces unique challenges and opportunities, so there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Here are several successful methods I've used in multiple organizations:
Build a learning culture: Encourage teams to reinvent themselves by offering training and certification programs. We incentivize team members to pursue training and development opportunities that elevate their current skills so they can grow and position themselves as experts and leaders in the business.
Create a technology thought leader community within your company: This community is critical in bringing ideas from execution teams for sponsorship and piloting. Once aligned, they become evangelists and a self-governed group for adopting best practices and tools, alleviating tool proliferation among developers.
Establish a structured approach to building POCs: While everyone talks about proof of concepts (POCs), execution can be challenging. We minimize prioritization and governance overhead, create capacity outside the everyday product development life cycle (PDLC), and time-box POCs once we gather sufficient insights instead of testing all possible edge cases.
As we wrap up our conversation, here’s a few fun facts about Damian that you should know:
Q: What’s the first thing you do in the morning?
It depends on where I am. When I’m working from home, I’ll spend the first hour of my morning getting my kids up and ready for school before going to my home office. When I’m travelling, I’ll usually get a fresh cup of coffee and then hit the gym!
Q: What’s the best piece of advice you have ever received?
One piece of advice that still resonates with me is to measure my legacy in an organization not by the number of big projects I launched but rather by how many tech leaders I groomed under my program—future Heads of Engineering or Product, CTOs, or Chief Architects!
Thanks again to Damian for his insightful insight on Developer Experience. Subscribe to this newsletter to get regular Q&As in your inbox, and reach out to [email protected] if you’re interested in sharing your own perspective.
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Want to dive deeper into Developer Experience trends?
Harness released the 2024 State of Developer Experience report earlier this year, which gathered insights from 500 engineering leaders and practitioners. We learned that many development teams rely on a patchwork of disparate DevOps tools, leading to fragmentation, inefficiencies, and a lack of cohesion. Read the full report here.
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