Mobile Developer Productivity Engineering at Europe's Largest Online Fashion Store -Hakkim Alavudeen

Developer productivity is heavily impacted by infrastructure friction, with slow builds being one of the biggest pain points - waiting for builds is analogous to waiting at traffic lights

Modularization of large monolithic codebases can improve build times and developer experience, but requires careful management to avoid module explosion (e.g. Uber manages 12,000 modules)

Key metrics for measuring developer productivity include:

• Deployment frequency
• Lead time for changes
• Mean time to restore (MTTR)
• Change failure rate
• Developer experience (DevEx) metrics

Companies are investing in build engineering optimizations through:

• Sophisticated build tooling (e.g. Gradle Enterprise)
• Test parallelization
• Build caching
• Cloud/remote IDEs

Focus state and uninterrupted coding time significantly correlate with developer productivity - tools like focus bots can help protect developer flow

Technical debt management is critical but underinvested:

• 40% of developer time is spent managing tech debt
• Only 10% of managers actively invest in tech debt reduction
• Need better transparency into tech debt impact

Mobile development faces unique challenges:

• Multiple form factors and OS versions
• Complex release processes through app stores
• Many teams working on single binary
• Growing importance with 4x app visit growth vs web

Successful developer productivity requires balancing:

• Infrastructure and tooling
• Process efficiency
• Developer experience
• Business impact
• Sustainable practices

Companies investing in developer productivity gain competitive advantages through faster innovation cycles and better engineer retention

Measurement should focus on enabling improvement rather than policing developers - when metrics become targets they cease being good measures