DEVOPSdigest

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2023. Part 3 covers developers and the developer experience.

Start with: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 2

MEASURING DEVELOPER PERFORMANCE

In 2023, we will see a major shift in how businesses measure the effectiveness of developers' work. I believe that companies will start analyzing developer activities and outputs, similar to how sales teams are evaluated, and that an element of gamification may come into play as well. With businesses now able to access critical tools that measure employee performance across departments, developer teams will be able to showcase the invaluable work they are doing, and how they are achieving those outcomes. I think this will be a positive shift in the way businesses run their tasks and teams because it will advocate for the most critical facets of the company, like engineering and development
Nick Durkin
Field CTO, Harness(link is external)

Amplifying Measurement of Success — In an economic downturn, there's much more scrutiny on ROI and measuring success. In 2023, developers will need to tie their work directly to business impact. The best products become fuel for business growth, and yet, many teams are still shipping features without measurement in place. Dev leaders need to be able to answer questions like: Is this feature improving engagement? Are customers leveraging our product in the way we intended? This year we'll see developers and engineers devoting much more time to measurement and reporting, because their C-suite executives will be asking.
Shadi Rostami
SVP of Engineering, Amplitude(link is external)

Organizations have begun to recognize that source code is a key strategic asset. As the economy gets more precarious, code will only become a more critical business differentiator. At the same time, enterprises will have to do more with the same or fewer resources as budgets continue to tighten. Delivering more and better code is a simple way for companies to improve revenue without increasing spending. As a result, CIOs will begin focusing on developer productivity as a KPI to ensure that quality code is maximizing business results.
Olivier Gaudin
CEO and Co-Founder, SonarSource(link is external)

2023 is going to be the year of doing more with less. On the one hand, most companies are trimming the fat, reducing the headcount, and thinking twice and thrice about new hires. On the other hand, the need to achieve business results is in no way decreasing. We are all going to have to take a hard look at how our engineers are spending their precious time. Nothing is going to make your engineers more efficient than having them spend less time on debugging — so it may be time to look at your tooling here and choose a best-of-breed solution.
Liran Haimovitch
CTO and Co-Founder, Rookout(link is external)

RETHINKING DEVELOPMENT BEST PRACTICES

The importance of a great developer experience will force a fundamental rethink of "best practices" like shift-left, that dump more responsibility on developers at the cost of innovation. The shift will include looking at the entire SDLC holistically and continuously, instead of a point-in-place or point-in-time viewpoint, to increase innovation safely, with less burden on developers.
Tim Johnson
Senior Product Marketing Manager, CloudBees(link is external)

DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE BECOMES ENTERPRISE IMPERATIVE

Creating and nurturing software competency is no longer something organizations can put off. Amid a looming economic recession, enterprises are increasingly focused on creating opportunities that can drive growth, retention and innovation. A key way for organizations to do this is to prioritize developer productivity and agility. In 2023, we'll see more organizations investing in tools and practices that can build a culture of software development with the developer experience in mind. This is how organizations will continue to attract and retain talent to solve the tasks of today while developing confidence for the future.
Edward Hieatt
SVP, VMware Tanzu(link is external)

AI IMPROVES DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

As we head into a recession, CIOs are tightening their budgets. With less resources and staff to manage all the developmental tasks, CIOs will need to identify new ways to increase productivity. In 2023, software development methods will change through the use of AI to speed the development of applications. Automation will quickly become critical to boost developer productivity, increase creativity, and reduce time spent on mundane tasks. Companies will turn to AI to help their teams by automating repetitive tasks, eliminating tedious work, and validating the quality of applications before they go into production.
Prakash Vyas
Head of Portfolio Marketing, OutSystems(link is external)

RE-EVALUATION OF DEVELOPER WORKFLOW TO COMBAT BURNOUT

As the workforce changes and digital transformation continues, burnout is surging. To fight this issue in 2023, we need to re-evaluate the developer workflow and overall experience to identify pain points. Engineering leadership will quickly notice that technical debt is the significant factor contributing to developer fatigue and eventual burnout. Degrading legacy software and the rapid pace of innovation require manual, tedious work for developers to deal with. Repetitive tasks are just busy work. By investing in scalable and resilient development infrastructure and low-code/no-code tools, leadership will enable developers to focus less on repetitive tasks and more on impactful, creative work they enjoy.
Vik Gamov
Principal Developer Advocate, Kong(link is external)

Developer burnout is a major problem that causes enterprises to lose many talented programmers. As we head into 2023, companies are addressing this challenge by improving the developer experience. This includes a variety of different tools and initiatives. Overall, enterprises are increasingly leveraging technology and methods to improve coding efficiency, eliminating cumbersome rework and many mind-numbing manual programming tasks. This liberates developers so they can focus on continuing their professional growth and doing what they love the most — delivering innovative software through well-written, clean code. Organizations will benefit from reduced employee turnover, and will also see business gains with devs free to focus on higher value projects.
Olivier Gaudin
CEO and Co-Founder, SonarSource(link is external)

FACING THE REMOTE DEVELOPMENT DECISION

It's clear at this point that for the tech industry, remote work is here to stay. Individual developers with a clear set of tasks to accomplish thrive in the focus and reduction in wasted time (i.e. commutes) afforded by work-from-home. During the pandemic, everyone got an unanticipated, non-optional chance to try out fully remote work, and through a set of shared sacrifices, teams made it work. 2023 will be the first full post-pandemic year (by some definitions) and teams need to start making intentional choices about where along the spectrum they want to operate (remote, hybrid, in-person). The more flexibility you offer your workforce, the more you'll need to invest in asynchronous management and collaboration. Some companies will use the perception of a tightening labor market to mandate return-to-office while others will use flexible working arrangements as a powerful recruiting advantage. Either way, employees' willingness to accept poor organization as a temporary, unfortunate byproduct of a generational pandemic has run out. Each working arrangement has tradeoffs, and organizations must address the ones they've made head-on.
Joseph Ruscio
General Partner, Heavybit(link is external)

TOOLING SUPPORTS REMOTE DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

Developers and QA professionals are some of the most sought-after skilled laborers who are acutely aware of the value they provide to organizations. As we head into next year, this group will continue to leverage the demand for their skills in pursuit of their ideal work environment. Companies who do not actively consider their developer experience and simply force pre-pandemic systems onto a hybrid-first world set themselves up for failure, especially when tools for remote and virtual testing and quality assurance are readily available. Developer teams also need to be equally equipped for success through the tools and opportunities that can help ensure an innate sense of value to the organization — and if they don't have the tools they need, these developers will find them elsewhere.
Martha Jensen
Chief People Officer, Sauce Labs(link is external)

We will continue to see a rise in distributed engineering teams and the tooling to support this decentralized strategy for development. To support this continued direction, Browser Development Environments (BDEs) and other cloud-based environments will see increased adoption in the coming year. These development environments provide highly customizable workspaces that boost collaboration and give IT leaders a central area to oversee work-from-home and office-based coding without sacrificing the speed and flexibility of local development.
Jon Mort
CTO, Adaptavist(link is external)

THE RISE OF CITIZEN DEVELOPERS

With an increasingly digital savvy population, traditional non-technical audiences are becoming technically proficient and confident in using more complex systems. Combined with advances in user experience design and usability improvements, these new non-technical users can develop for their specific needs through low-code or no-code technology — in many cases removing the need for a separate requirements document for a technical team to implement. This reduces time to delivery and the risk of misinterpretation and increases overall efficiency.
Gareth Smith
GM Software Test Automation, Keysight Technologies(link is external)

Go to: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 4, covering development tools and agile development.