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SE Radio 628: Hans Dockter on Developer Productivity
Hans Dockter, the creator of the Gradle build tool and founder of Gradle Inc, the company behind the developer productivity platform Develocity, joins SE Radio host Giovanni Asproni to talk about developer productivity. They start with some definitions and an explanation of the importance of developer productivity, its relationship with cognitive load, and the big impact that development tools have on it. Hans describes how to implement developer productivity metrics in an organization, as well as warns about some pitfalls. The episode closes with some discussion on Hans's views on the future of this discipline, as well as some near-term developments and expectations. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
Hans Dockter, the creator of the Gradle build tool and founder of Gradle Inc, the company behind the developer productivity platform Develocity, joins Giovanni Asproni to talk about developer productivity. They start with some definitions and an explanation of the importance of developer productivity, its relationship with cognitive load, and the big impact that development tools have on it. Hans describes how to implement developer productivity metrics in an organization, as well as warns about some pitfalls. The episode closes with some discussion on Hans’s views on the future of this discipline, as well as some near-term developments and expectations. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
Show Notes
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- Book: Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers
Transcript
Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society. This transcript was automatically generated. To suggest improvements in the text, please contact [email protected] and include the episode number.
Giovanni Asproni 00:00:18 Welcome to Software Engineering Radio. I’m your host, Giovanni Asproni, and today I’ll be discussing developer productivity with Hans Dockter. Hans is a software engineer and the creator of the Gradle build tool is the founder of Gradle link, the company maintaining and developing Gradle, and which is behind also Develocity, a developer productivity platform. Hans, welcome to the show. Is there anything missed that you’d like to add?
Hans Dockter 00:00:40 No, I think it was a great introduction. Thanks for having me, Giovanni, and looking forward to our conversation today. I’m very excited about it.
Giovanni Asproni 00:00:47 Well, me too. The pleasure is mine. I’m very excited as well. I find this a very interesting subject. So let’s start. What is developer productivity?
Hans Dockter 00:00:55 You start with a hard one. Yeah, so for me, developer productivity is a theoretical potential for how productive a developer can be, ? And then there is the actual productivity of a developer, ? And for me, the developer productivity is about how close is the actual productivity to the maximum productivity your development team could provide to you.
Giovanni Asproni 00:01:20 So in the intuitive times, what we mean with productivity is kind of number of feature develop per unit of time is something else.
Hans Dockter 00:01:27 Yes. I mean, you know, the whole space framework, ? Or I think it is multi-dimensional, ? So for me, every metric that we can quantify is only a reflection or a hypothesis, ? How this could affect the actual productivity, ? I think we cannot reduce productivity to a metric. What we can do though, there are a lot of metrics that indicate that your actual productivity is far from your maximum productivity. So when you know the feedback cycle times are two hours, when you know every second build fails with flaky test, ? And you have a lot of unnecessary interruptions, there is a huge impediment, ? That reduces your actual productivity. And that is what we are focusing on. What are the roadblocks? What is by definition, affecting negatively the productivity? Let’s say if a development team works in a perfect environment, then kind of from perspective, then the machinery has done its job, ? That’s what we are focusing on. But then to measure what is really productivity, I don’t think at the moment we have the metrics only, let’s say in thought experiments. Yes. If someone doesn’t commit any code, it’s probably over a year. You know, there’s probably not much productivity, but otherwise, all those metrics that you talked about could be gained.
Giovanni Asproni 00:02:45 When we talk about productivity, developer productivity, now there is this whole field, maybe, I don’t think it’s very new, but certainly now since to be gaining more traction, the developer productivity engineering. And what is this about? It’s about finding matters to improve this developer productivity.
Hans Dockter 00:03:02 Yes. So the way I look at it, in theory, it’s not new for all practical purposes, it’s new. And why I say it’s new, I think when you look 10 or 15 years back, ? The people who worked on productivity, let’s say the people who worked on CI or the people who worked on build systems, or on the builds, were considered not good enough to work on a production code. So that’s why I would challenge it a little bit. It’s not new. I think as a discipline in software, it was a completely esoteric and niche thing hardly any organization focused on and appreciated, ? So that has fortunately changed. And DPE, ? So there are many dimensions that affect developer productivity. Could be the food in the cafeteria or you know, many, many things. But that is not what DPE is focusing on, on all the dimensions, ? DPE focuses on what I think is the biggest impediment to develop our productivity. And that is the tool chain, definitely in an enterprise context. There’s a lot of other important vectors that affected, but that is at the heart of the, I would call it the developer productivity crisis that we are in, ? That we slowly awakening to that is at the heart of it. And DPE is a practice that tries to professionalize how we look at the developer tool chain and how we improve it.
Giovanni Asproni 00:04:25 Okay. And now why is developer productivity so important?
Hans Dockter 00:04:28 Because the actual productivity is far, far, far from where it could be. So there is a huge waste. If that weren’t the case, then we wouldn’t need to have that conversation. But the reality is that there is a transformational opportunity for organizations to get order of magnitude improvements when it comes to the output, or at least many factors of improvement of their code output if they invest into this area. And some organizations are showing that this is possible, ? That’s, that’s why it’s so important. That’s why I’m intrigued working in this area because it’s transformational in my opinion. Yeah.
Giovanni Asproni 00:05:04 Okay. Yeah, I agree that that is a lot of waste in software development in many projects. I mean, I’ve seen many of those cases where we waste time and effort. And there is a lot that can be done to improve the situation. But now I’ve got also another question because when I think productivity, I’m thinking also about developer experience. They will, you know, you mentioned the tool chain. So what is the relationship between developer productivity and developer experience?
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