Unleash your potential with an exceptional Developer Experience
Developer Experience (DX) is the experience your engineers and developers have in using the tools, platforms, ways of working and applications when building digital products. For example, when an engineer develops a new API, how easy and frictionless is it for them to do so?, Do they have the correct access? Can they find documentation easily? Must they work with external teams to provision infrastructure?
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Driving and maintaining standards
Traditionally when scaling teams, it was always the common trend to enforce organisation-wide choices in tooling, platforms, processes and turn engineering skill sets. The logic is, that if you force your engineers to work in a particular way, maintenance will be easier and products are easier to build at scale. The result, however, was a contrast to the expected benefits.
In digital engineering, one tool will rarely solve all problems and indeed forcing engineers to use tools unsuitable for the job only leads to frustration and poor outcomes. This is what we call in a nutshell a poor ‘Developer Experience’.
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Communication
A culture of idea sharing, where communication is easy amongst feature and platform teams is a key part of ensuring good DX. Having platform engineers and developers communicate freely and easily will improve the service overall and prevent frustration caused by dependencies, misuse and implementation.
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Technological Freedom
As mentioned before, giving engineers the freedom to pick and choose the tooling they need within reason. We want to avoid fragmentation, so promoting and designing things like a ‘Golden Path’ helps engineers maintain freedom with an element of organisational governance.
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Experimentation
To contribute to tooling choices and building digital products, experimentation and a fail/fall fast culture is important. The data gathered from experiments and trying out new approaches and tooling can be used to better the developer experience over time.
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Onboarding and system access
New developers should have a seamless and frictionless ability to do their job. Laptops must be sufficient, access to environments, understanding where documentation is and ultimately the process of getting started is the first experience engineers have, so it must be a good one.
Improving your Developer Experience
You can probably guess that autocratic approaches to digital engineering are in steep decline, with the enforcement of standard technologies, architectures and tools quickly becoming a thing of the past. The emerging approach is to develop appealing, reusable tools and platforms to be consumed by your teams, with clearly defined and automated guardrails. Allowing for autonomy, and efficiency but retaining the necessary levels of quality and security.
At ClearRoute we help organisations improve their Developer Experience by focusing on three main areas:
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Developer hub
A central place where developers can find documentation, how-to’s, and tutorials, and connect with the organisation’s wider engineering community.
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Golden path
An easy-to-use collection of tooling, applications and environment set up and provisioning enabled through templates and modules. It allows developers not only the ability to get up and running quickly but enables them to build products for the long term through consistent and complimentary toolsets and techniques.
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Measuring DX & quality
We want to ensure that we consistently improve our DX, and we can only do this by benchmarking and continually monitoring our defined measures of success.
Create an enjoyable experience for your teams
Having happy and productive engineers are key to building and delivering software products. A pleasurable Developer Experience, and in turn satisfaction motivate your engineers and drive their creativity by removing frustrating processes and practices. To truly supercharge your Route to Live, you must invest in Developer Experience, define your key success metrics and continually measure them to drive constant improvement.
Technologies we work with
Case Study
Transforming an Oil Trading Platform
Defining the pattern for Global IT Modernisation Programme, by implementing Test First and Continuous Testing across multiple teams
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Take advantage of ClearRoute’s engineering-led approach to vastly accelerate your ‘Route To Live’ and deliver enduring change in your development team. Get in touch today.
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