A survey of 300 IT professionals working in software engineering departments in the U.S. and Western Europe that have more than 150 developers, finds 75% are losing anywhere from six to 15 hours a week because of tool sprawl as respondents on average navigate 7.4 tools to build applications.
Conducted by Global Surveyz on behalf of Port, Inc., a provider of an internal developer portal (IDP), the survey also finds only 22% can on average resolve an engineering issue within one day.
More troubling still, well over half (55%) don’t trust the veracity of data surfaced in tool repositories and nearly all (94%) are to some degree dissatisfied with their current toolsets.
Jim Morgan, head of product marketing for Port, Inc., said the survey results make it clear there is a need for internal developer portals (IDP) that go well beyond simply providing access to a set of tools that have been approved for developers to use. Instead, development teams require an IDP that makes it simpler to preserve context as they switch from using one tool to another, he added.
There is, of course, a lot of focus these days on improving developer productivity but many of them are still manually performing a range of tasks that have little to do with actually writing code, including creating cloud resources (48%), determining compliance with standards (46%) and scaffolding new services or application programming interfaces (44%).
Additionally, much of the critical tribal knowledge that the organization relies on resides only in the heads of a few senior developers that the rest of the team constantly needs to ask for help, noted Morgan. Unfortunately, when there is no single source of truth it’s not uncommon for multiple senior developers to provide conflicting responses to those questions, he added.
An IDP not only provides a centralized method for governing what tools are used, it should also provide developers with the reliable data they need to self-service their requirements, said Morgan.
Fortunately, there is growing interest in adopting platform engineering as a DevOps methodology that should improve developer productivity. One of the first things a platform engineering team will initially set up is an IDP. The challenge, as always, is getting developers to buy into platform engineering as a method for improving their experience even if it means they may not be allowed to use certain tools.
As it is with most DevOps initiatives, IDPs require champions who are committed to successfully implementing them. Most organizations have multiple DevOps teams that have standardized their own set of preferred tools and platforms. Rationalizing those tools and platforms in the name of greater efficiency and reducing costs is not always at the top of the priority list for application developers who tend to be more focused on how to write the best code possible. As such, responsibility for deploying and managing an IDP will need to fall to some type of centralized IT function that will need to earn the trust of the application development team it services.
Without the commitment, the current level of developer productivity is not likely to improve without some effort to better integrate the tools organizations provide. The issue, as always, is overcoming the organizational inertia that conspires to make deploying an IDP a cultural challenge that not many IT professionals might want to take on.
