Reframing "Developer Productivity"
Reframing "Developer Productivity"
Reframing "Developer Productivity"
Reframing "Developer Productivity"
Reframing "Developer Productivity"
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Tearing down old assumptions, bringing new perspectives
Bridging minds across research and industry to create new possibilities in software
Reframing "Developer Productivity"
Get inspired with great ideas co-created at the event
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All artifacts generated during the event will be Open Source.
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What's the Plan?
1
Understand the Problems and Constraints
that make software difficult
by sharing our stories
2
Explore and Get Inspired
with research and industry thought leaders leading community discussions
3
Synthesize and Integrate
what we've learned
into useful actionable takeaways for the community
Navigating the Virtual Event
1. Inspiring Talks
Get inspired by thought leaders from research or industry with talks that frame a table discussion topic for the community.
2. Table Discussions
Gather around virtual tables and discuss your ideas inspired by the talk, with a set of collaboration tools ready to go for each table.
3. The Idea Garden
Summarize key takeaways in a poster, and share your poster in the idea garden. Visit the garden anytime to check out the posters.
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What are we aiming for?
With the shift in recent years to a world of working remotely, conversations around metrics and developer productivity have sparked a lot of heated debate.
When we measure ourselves primarily under a productivity-centric lens, it can lead us to adopt suboptimal policies and practices which impair, rather than enhance, overall productivity. For example, any contribution that's not directly related to coding features, we tend to de-value. This often leads to front-line workers and their immediate supervisors having to work 10x harder to justify any work that doesn't "look like" productivity, even when the work is critical to the long-term success of the project. Developers can become reluctant to help one another when it means a decline in the productivity metrics they’re measured by. These are frustrating and unnecessary problems to have, that keep us from doing our best work.
With our combined capabilities, we can create something better. What if we had a picture of our "aim" that considered these intangible human factors? A compass that gave us a better sense of direction, while still leaving space to explore and improve over time.
Think of this triangle as a place to start the discussion:
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Developer Experience: What can we do to improve the developer's experience when working on tasks? What frictions get in the way?
Software Excellence: How do we build something that matters, and do awesome quality work?
Thriving: How do we go from surviving to thriving?
Why these 3 things?
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There's been a number of significant contributions across both research and industry toward improving the art and practice of software development. To name just a few:
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Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE)
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Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
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Xtreme Programming (XP)
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SPACE / Developer Thriving Framework / DORA / DevEx
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Continuous Delivery / Observability
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​Agile / Kanban / Lean
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Conway’s Law / Team Topologies
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The Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) community shifted the conversation with the idea of "joy == productivity" and a mission of developer joy. Although joy and productivity aren't really the same thing, there's a relationship between the two. We know reducing developer friction and toil tends to improve developer happiness, and boosts productivity too.
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Emerging research suggests Developer Experience and Developer Thriving are both key factors in software success, and both predict productivity. So if we focus on Experience and Thriving, we ought to get productivity for free.
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While this is headed in a good direction, the picture is still incomplete. With both Experience and Thriving, we're mostly looking at ourselves, instead of the thing we're building. We also want to innovate, build an excellent product and high quality software. Software Excellence is also key.
Experience, Thriving and Excellence together, give us a better sense of direction. It's a compass that helps us understand what questions to ask, and a way to evaluate whether the things we're doing are making things better.
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An academic context gives us a neutral space to collaborate across the industry and work toward making things better for everyone.
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We ask everyone to step outside of their corporate roles for the event, and to show up as a human with experiences and thoughts to share. We strive to make space for a diversity of ideas, showing respect for one another, and the maturity to contain multiple perspectives without having to agree.
Organized by CHISEL at University of Victoria
Computer Human Interaction and Software Engineering Lab
Join us at Basecamp for Bridges Summit!
Virtual Conference Online: August 28th, 2024
We're planning a 2-conference series, aimed at collaborating, exploring, and distilling practical wisdom related to Experience, Thriving and Excellence in pragmatic ways that are helpful to the community.
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First, we'll meet up online at Bridges Basecamp, and focus on exploring the space of what we've learned so far related to doing great at software. Then at Bridges Summit we'll focus on synthesis and integration, and try to distill some clarity on what we're aiming for. This time we'll meet up in person so we can do whiteboards, paper and stickies, and experience a bit of the magic of being embodied persons.
All the artifacts generated by the community during the events will be Open Source.
