Developer Productivity Engineering: What's in it for me? by Trisha Gee

Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) focuses on maximizing developer productivity and happiness through improved build and test feedback cycles

Developers typically spend only 32% of their time writing code, with significant time lost waiting for builds and tests to complete

Key pain points include:

• Long build and test times
• Flaky tests eroding trust in test suites
• Inefficient CI resource usage
• Poor troubleshooting capabilities
• Limited observability into developer environments

Acceleration technologies that can help:

• Build caching to avoid redundant work
• Test distribution for parallel execution
• Predictive test selection using ML to run only relevant tests
• Build scans for better troubleshooting

Fast feedback cycles lead to:

• Increased developer productivity
• Better quality through earlier problem detection
• Reduced context switching
• Improved developer happiness
• Lower costs through more efficient resource usage

Organizations should treat developer environments and tools with production-level SLAs since they directly impact productivity

The “10x developer” concept is more about providing the right environment and tools than individual capability

Without active maintenance and improvement of build/test systems, entropy will cause gradual degradation of performance

Measuring and observing actual build/test times and developer pain points is crucial for identifying opportunities for improvement