Developer Impact on the Bottom Line
Starting down the cloud native path can be challenging. You need to learn new technologies like Kubernetes, the ecosystem of tools that support it, and a whole new way of working. Companies who successfully transition will benefit with an increase in velocity, scalability and innovation.
A few days ago a report called ‘The Developer Coefficient: Software engineering efficiency and its $3 trillion impact on global GDP” was published by Stripe, the company that revolutionized payments on the web.
The report’s analysis concluded that how you manage your development teams may be one of the most important decisions for your future success as a company. The time wasted by the average developer every week that doesn’t contribute to the bottom line is estimated to be almost $85 billion globally in lost opportunity.
Increase in developer productivity is a top priority
96% of those surveyed say that increasing developer productivity is a High/ Medium priority.
But according to the survey, senior management also cited a lack of developer skills as the biggest potential threat to their success. Senior executives in fact worry more about getting the right talent in place, than having access to capital. However this analysis suggests that getting your developers to work on the right things has a much bigger impact on a company’s ability to accelerate into new markets and build more innovative products. It’s not just how many developers you have, but rather, it’s how they are being leveraged that counts more.
Starting down the cloud native path can be challenging for many companies. You need to learn new technologies like Kubernetes, the ecosystem of tools that support it, as well as, a whole new way of working. But companies who successfully transition will reap the rewards with an increase in velocity, scalability and innovation.
Bad code costs companies $85 billion annually
Even though it’s a priority for most companies to increase productivity, the average developer spends more than 17 hours a week dealing with maintenance issues such as debugging and refactoring. They also spend almost four hours a week on bad code. All of this translates into nearly 85 billion worldwide lost annual costs.
Developers agree that time wasted on technical debt and on bad code are two of the biggest timesinks during an average week. Most developers expressed that clear prioritization, responsibilities and long-term product goals improves their own productivity.
Digital Native companies are biggest threat
Digital Native companies (sometimes called the disruptors) are companies who have built their solutions from the ground up using modern cloud native technologies. For most traditional enterprises, Digital Natives are seen as the biggest threat.
To mitigate this, the survey asked what the top three areas most companies plan to invest in:
1. Cloud native infrastructure,
2. R&D and recruiting (tying for second place) and,
3. Marketing.
GitOps as DevOps best practices
Cloud native technologies like Kubernetes are the primary driver behind the DevOps shift seen today in Digital Native companies. DevOps has led us to a whole new set of methods and philosophies on how to do software development. Companies who adapt cloud native technologies and DevOps best practices like GitOps can increase Mean Time to Deployment from 1 or 2 deployments a week to 150 deployments or more in a single day.
When you can continuously and reliably deploy changes, development teams are able to use more advanced deployment strategies like canaries to experiment and test new features with your user base. With your entire system versioned in git, rolling backward or forward is simple, allowing developers to make frequent low-risk changes that can be easily backed out of, reducing the chances of deploying bad code that can increase technical debt and take up valuable developer time.
With this kind of automation and velocity, enterprises can bring new ideas to production within minutes or hours instead of weeks and months, resulting in a greater rate of innovation and competitiveness and also better use of your development teams’ time and resources.
Weaveworks Enterprise Kubernetes Platform
Get up to speed quickly with the Weaveworks Enterprise Kubernetes Platform (WKP). WKP combines cluster and container management with GitOps, providing a flexible operating model for clusters. Reproducible clusters can be spun up anywhere, and on any environment, reducing the steep learning curve associated with Kubernetes and eliminating technical debt.
We provide an out-of-the-box production ready, full stack experience that makes it simple to get into production with Kubernetes, and to effectively manage changes across all of your environments:
- User interface, providing a single pane of glass across all your clusters.
- A powerful set of tools for operations teams to manage and upgrade clusters more efficiently.
- Production ready cluster with the components needed for managing security, CD, monitoring, ingress/egress and more.
- Professional training designed to reduce friction that impedes developer productivity.
Contact us for more details or learn more about the Weaveworks Kubernetes Platform.
Final Thoughts
Businesses need to better leverage their own engineering teams rather than worrying (too much) about hiring more engineers. According to the “Mythical Man Month”, sometimes adding more developers to a problem doesn’t always solve the problem faster and can in fact make things worse. If companies want to move faster, they need to better utilize existing software engineering talent and also adopt and implement continuous delivery and other DevOps best practices such as GitOps.
Read the full report.
Heading to Kubecon in Barcelona?
KubeCon Europe is right around the corner, from May 21 - May 23. This year the CNCF anticipates over 10,000 participants for this event. We’re bringing back a workshop that was well-received last year, participating in speaking sessions with friends of Weaveworks, and joining panel discussions.
