Part three:
Empowerment and autonomy

Fostering a developer-centric culture with self-service tools and streamlined workflows to enhance productivity and innovation.

Discover your DevOps state

Part three:

Empowerment and autonomy

As we explained in part one, DevEx is at the heart of a developer-centric culture, and constantly improving it is essential if you want to enhance software delivery efficiency, agility, and effectiveness. Alongside a collaborative, transparent, and agile culture, empowerment and autonomy have become synonymous with a good developer experience, but how can you cultivate and promote these?

The impact of positive developer experiences

DevEx can directly affect the success of your software development process. A 2023 Forrester Snapshot found that a staggering 74% of respondents improved their productivity by enhancing DevEx. Additionally, 85% reported an impact on revenue growth, and 82% noted a rise in customer satisfaction. So, how can you create a positive impact on your DevEx?

Streamlining workflows

Many of the DevOps practices we’ve already covered go some way to creating a good developer experience, including providing developers with greater visibility so they can work quickly; effective collaboration tools for fast communication and knowledge sharing; automation to find and fix bugs earlier and manage code more effectively, and fast feedback loops to enable agile working.

Beyond that, you should consider streamlining your workflows using source code management. This allows developers to know what needs to change as soon as they get started, reducing friction. They should also have easy access to operational insights, so they can understand and prioritise issues and work more collaboratively with operations teams.

Almost all of these practices are made far easier by self-service and an IDP, empowering developers to work autonomously with all the tools and information they need at their fingertips.

The role of self-service platforms

Self-service, supported by an Internal Developer Platform (IDP), is another key instrument for enabling developers to work autonomously. In any domain, self-service done poorly leads to confusion, dissatisfaction, and a slower, more painful experience. But done right, it can speed things up, remove friction, reduce bottlenecks, and increase productivity. And that’s what you should be aiming for. The quicker work gets done, the quicker projects get over the line and the quicker you can deliver value to customers.

With comprehensive, accessible documentation – like source code libraries and service catalogues – all in an easy-to-search format, developers can focus on what they do best and avoid wasting time worrying about documentation and infrastructure.

How to reduce friction

If a friction-free environment for your developers is the goal, then what steps can you take to get there?

01.

Start by conducting regular audits, evaluating your existing tools and processes to identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Your tools should enable collaboration, speed up processes, and have strong integration capabilities – so implement and upgrade where necessary.

02.

Alongside routine task automation and AI-powered feedback loops, if you don’t already have clear, well-documented coding practices, that’s something you’re going to need to address. These can improve code readability and make it easier to maintain. Automated code reviews are a good place to start to get your guidelines up to scratch.

03.

With friction identified, you can simplify, accelerate, and optimise all your tools, systems, and processes. But monitor the situation to make sure your DevEx efforts are making improvements and not just adding more friction. Cutting down on the number of meetings, for example, might seem to reduce context switching, but it could impact collaboration. Implementing a DevEx team tasked with understanding, improving, and tracking these initiatives is ideal.

Discover your DevOps state

Are IPDs the answer?

According to the Forrester Snapshot, 43 percent of respondents said IDPs enable true developer self-service, helping them to become less reliant on ops.

Everything they need, all in one place

As cloud architectures become more complex, ops tickets cause inevitable bottlenecks – a huge pain point for developers. But IDPs provide a curated set of processes and tools that are easy for developers to digest independently, helping them to become less reliant on ops teams and improving their velocity. This, in turn, reduces time to market and helps grow revenue, all while having a huge impact on developer satisfaction.

Having an IDP also opens the doors for another key component of good DevEx – continuous learning opportunities. With information available and accessible, developers can grow their knowledge base and learn from each other’s expertise.