The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference gathers adopters and technologists from leading open-source and cloud-native communities together.
November 12th, 2024 - November 15th, 2024
Salt Lake City, Utah
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It’s no secret developers are some of enterprises’ most valuable, expensive, and hard-to-replace assets. So it stands to reason that organizations should put the highest priority on ensuring that developers are not only working as efficiently and effectively as possible but that they’re happy as well.
Unfortunately, developer satisfaction and productivity is strained. A Zenhub survey showed 10% are dissatisfied, and only 31% were extremely satisfied with their jobs. Plus, developer productivity is lagging for a very good reason: the software industry has moved so many tasks onto developers’ plates that less than a third of their time is spent writing code.
The “shift left” approach—integrating testing and quality control early in the development process—is causing a significant workload increase for developers. According to the CDE Adoption Report, developers now spend nearly as much time on planning, testing, deploying, and maintaining software as they do on actual coding.
There’s a solution. Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) go a long way toward solving these two interrelated issues – the prolonged time to merge and developers’ frustrations with the tasks that impede their productivity.
They shift important development processes like writing code, executing builds, running tests, and deploying applications out of local environments and into the cloud. This streamlines the developer experience, providing organizations’ prized assets with more flexibility and efficiency, helping them to collaborate better and release higher-quality software faster.
A recent Coder survey of 223 developers and business leaders, the focal point of our CDE Adoption Report, shed new light on the role CDEs are playing in making developers happier and more productive. Developers using CDEs reported a 15% higher metric in their overall quality of life compared to developers using conventional coding environments. Coder was one of the top-scoring CDEs (4.4/5) that made developers happier. Respondents also noted that CDEs generated overall productivity improvements in the set-up and ongoing management of development environments.
Let’s unpack these issues.
The biggest frustration developers face is having to suffer through lengthy onboarding – not only when they’re first hired, but whenever environments have to be updated along the way. In conventional enterprise environments, it can take days or weeks to equip each developer before any lines of code are written. This isn’t the case with CDEs. As Elliot Graebert, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure, Skydio, noted in the CDE Adoption Report: “The time from setting up a new workstation to the first commit to production plummeted from a week to as little as an hour.”
They do this by removing the complexity from the developer onboarding experience. All the development tools, services, and infrastructure developers need can be made accessible through a web browser, or even by connecting through an extension on a local IDE. Often with a configured CDE, all IT departments have to do is give developers a URL and have them sign on.
Still, onboarding is more than just a one-time task to be carried out at the time of hiring. Large enterprises typically shift developers to new projects four to six times per year, each incurring an “onboarding” tax as they set up the right tools, languages, dependencies, and repositories.
CDEs remove other sources of friction as well.
Developers are at their best when they can concentrate on crafting quality code without the hassle of managing their development environments. CDEs offer a straightforward solution, removing these obstacles and increasing developer experience and productivity. This approach not only benefits developers by allowing them to focus on their core tasks but also boosts their value to the organization.
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