Developer Empowerment Through Deployment Tools and Processes
A development team that is empowered is a benefit to your entire organization. They feel connected to their work, invested in success, are able to make the right decisions, and can work efficiently and independently. Empowered developer teams are often happier, code better, and release features more quickly, helping show your business value faster.
What is Developer Empowerment?
Empowered developers have elite engineering tools, systems and processes. They also have healthy and productive team cultures. Empowered teams address challenges together, share knowledge with each other and throughout the org, and invest in the product. These teams are more easily inspired, efficient, and productive because they feel supported.
Investing in best-in-class tools, enabling developer productivity by removing friction, and alleviating complexities are the goals of any organization looking to empower developers.
According to the 2022 API & Microservices Connectivity Report by Kong, 75% of technology leaders fear competitive displacement if they fail to keep pace with digital innovation, up from 62% in 2021 and 57% in 2020. Complexity of using multiple technologies (38%), reliance on legacy technologies/monolithic architectures (37%) and lack of IT automation (37%) were cited as top challenges hindering innovation.
What’s the Problem with Developer Empowerment?
Many organizations desire to increase developer productivity in order to get the highest returns from their engineering team investment. The problem is that tedious systems, tools, processes, and culture are holding developers back.
Removing friction, slow-downs, and manual steps from engineering systems is critical to having a high-performing development team. No engineering team can reach their full potential if they’re encountering issues that affect deployment frequency, change lead time, failure rates, or resolution time. These DORA metrics are crucial for measuring success and are often the first places to look to help alleviate problems and friction found in tools and processes.
Teams that experience friction with systems and tools can struggle to complete critical and even routine tasks. They are unable to focus on new features and innovation because they’re too busy pushing through manual steps, testing, human error, and deployment barriers. Then, if something goes wrong after deploying code, their ability to respond to failure is hampered by poor tooling, leading to bad outcomes for your features and releases.
For developers, general collaboration tools simply don’t solve these problems as they are not designed for engineering workflows. General collaborative software isn’t designed to deploy on-prem or to the cloud. They need purpose-driven tools that follow and support their workflow.
How Do You Solve the Problem of Developer Empowerment?
Burnout is at an all-time high. Inefficient workflows keep developer teams from performing their best. Organizations looking to heal developer burnout need to offer improved working environments with tech stacks that remove friction, support their workflows, and allow them to easily (and automatically) deploy their code.
Remove roadblocks of legacy technology. Set up a winning CI/CD tech stack that includes the latest continuous deployment tools. Pick developer-first solutions with automation, built-in security, and high performance so that developers are able to focus on actually building software that drives your business value.
Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service offers declarative deployment with a GitOps experience that developers love. Increase productivity and agility by declaring your targets and deployment strategy using the same development practices like version control and change history.
As growing startup Glovo expanded to serve 22+ countries and 300+ cities, their application development team could no longer manually keep up with their monolithic application’s updates. The team partnered with Armory to support their transition to a true Continuous Deployment (CD) pipeline via Spinnaker and AWS, increasing successful deployments to 2,000 per year. Learn more about Glovo’s glow up in this success story.
How Do You Empower Developers with Deployment Tools?
The first step to empowering your developers to create great code is to install a solid CI/CD process that prioritizes automation where possible. Devs shouldn’t have to worry after they commit code, only worry about building it and making sure it gets to production. A good CI/CD process ensures that their code is tested, deployed, and monitored successfully.
- Select relevant tools that support modern CI/CD workflows
- Ensure development, integration, and deployment is continuous, automated, and worry-free
- Invest in modern tools while also removing complexities
- Decrease fragmentation caused by legacy tools, old tech, and monoliths
- Consider open source applications so dev can get visibility and control over the entire stack
- Choose deployment tools and processes that can scale from one environment to hundreds
- Reduce the amount of code needed by turning explicit requirements into implicit interactions, like declarative deployment
- Enable flexibility for developers to customize to fit their needs
What are the Benefits of Deployment Tools?
Empowering developers leads to many benefits, but the top ones include:
- Higher developer productivity
- Improved developer retention
- Better, more innovative code with fewer issues
- Features released faster
- Better customer satisfaction
Who Benefits from Empowered Developers?
When organizations empower their development teams, the business benefits as well as the employees.
Developers – Empowered teams feel more attached to the companies where they work and more empathetic to the customers they serve, creating better products. When they’re provided great deployment tools, they can launch new features and services faster and more reliably.
Business and Operations – Organizations that take the time to empower their developers with the right tools and processes help their employees believe in the business values and mission, and help connect their work and the impact it has on the business’s goals.
Summary
When organizational leaders pursue a path toward developer empowerment, they not only find that their product teams are more productive, but that they are also inspired and committed to doing their best work for their organization, their customers, and each other.
Empower developers to deploy faster and better with the GitOps experience they love.
Commit. Deploy. Repeat.
Continuous Deployment at any scale, for all developers.