Navigating Backstage: A Year in Developer Life • Helen Greul • GOTO 2024

Developer portals like Backstage provide a centralized platform for documentation, service discovery, templates and tooling to improve developer experience

Key metrics showed tangible benefits:

• Reduced onboarding time from 60+ days to 20 days
• 80% developer satisfaction rate
• Documentation stayed 2x fresher compared to other sources
• Security vulnerability fixes reduced from months to hours

Golden Path standardization helped by:

• Creating opinionated templates per discipline
• Enabling self-service infrastructure
• Automating migrations and changes at scale
• Reducing tech stack fragmentation

Portal features that proved most impactful:

• Software catalog for component/service discovery
• Tech documentation as code next to source
• Automated dependency tracking
• Incident management integration
• Security and cost insights

Success factors for adoption:

• Making it accessible to everyone
• Distributed ownership model
• GitOps workflow integration
• Focus on self-service capabilities
• Active open source community

Developer experience improvements led to:

• Higher deployment frequency
• Better retention rates
• Reduced context switching
• More standardized practices
• Faster incident response

The journey required:

• Data-driven approach to measure impact
• Starting small with core services
• Building on internal feedback
• Evolving based on usage patterns
• Open sourcing to benefit wider community