Breaking through the developer productivity ceiling

Talia Moyal Head of Outbound Product at Gitpod

Sep 28, 2024

TL;DR: shift left to tackle development environments and break through the developer productivity ceiling

As a platform engineer, you’re tasked with improving developer experience and productivity. You’ve implemented CI/CD pipelines, internal developer portals (IDPs), and AI-assisted coding tools. Despite these improvements, you’re likely to hit a developer productivity ceiling. Here’s why and how to address it.

What impacts developer productivity most? 

Developers spend an average of 30 hours a week in their development environments. Approximately 50% of this time is spent on maintenance, debugging, dealing with technical debt, and reworking code. Reworking code alone can cost medium-sized businesses more than $4.7M per year.

Yet, most organizations who experience this negative impact would probably say they have active developer productivity initiatives. This is where the developer productivity ceiling comes in. The developer productivity ceiling represents the limit in productivity improvements an organization can make. Without shifting focus left to improve development environments, this gap widens, preventing breakthrough.

Developers using non-CDE setups are required to manually setup, maintain, and secure their development environments. This is a productivity killer:

• On average, developers spend two weeks configuring a single environment

• 45% of teams report poor integration between collaboration tools and other essential tools, leading to time-consuming context switches (Mattermost)

• Developers spend up to 30% of their time on code churn or unnecessary rework (Code Climate)

• Debugging consumes an average of 13 hours per week, costing companies $61 billion annually (DevOps.com)

None of this is too surprising – any developer will tell you that they spend unwanted amounts of time working through development environment problems. And if this is true, where are we spending our efforts when it comes to improving developer productivity, today?

GenAI and internal developer portals. And while both have their advantages, they don’t address the core of these productivity issues.

Breaking through the developer productivity ceiling with Gitpod 

Platform teams traditionally focus on over-optimizing the outer loop (everything developers do after they commit code). This effort eventually reaches diminishing returns. Paired with the challenges developers face, we end up with teams that hit their productivity ceiling.

To address this platform teams need to shift their sphere of influence left and prioritize the place developers are spending most of their time: development environments.

Gitpod’s cloud development environments (CDEs) allow platform teams to take control of the setup, maintenance, and security of development environments. This is done with minimal overhead, no infrastructure experience required, and without compromising developer experience.

Gitpod enables platform team’s and developers to automate common development workflows like:

• Dependencies: automate the installation of libraries, packages and dependencies. Configure a centralized Docker image that includes all your platform tooling such as your CLI. When you need a dependency changed in all development environments, simply update the configurations.

• Access management: automate developer access to networks, VPN and VPC configurations, and access to external resources such as databases or clusters.

• Extensions: manage the installation of extensions including any authentication or configuration. If you’re rolling out an AI assistant program for developers, you can automate its installation, configuration and even authentication. Developers don’t have to do anything, it just comes ready for them.

• Resources: configure the required resources for a given task. If developers need access to run a large build or test suite which requires more RAM or CPU, they can do that. You don’t need to set up complex self-serve interfaces to provision preview environments in your outer loop, instead developers can do that in their inner loop.

• Global security and compliance: apply security and compliance controls globally, ensuring that policies are consistently enforced without requiring manual intervention from developers.

These automations move developers away from their usual configuration and troubleshooting tasks, and focus on coding.

Breaking through the developer productivity ceiling isn’t just about implementing new tools or optimizing existing processes—it’s about fundamentally rethinking how we approach the entire software development lifecycle. By shifting our focus left and addressing the core issues in development environments, we can unlock unprecedented levels of productivity and innovation.

The results speak for themselves. With an average of 800 hours saved annually on developer onboarding and a 15% increase in overall developer productivity, Gitpod customers are seeing tangible benefits that directly impact their bottom line.

Try Gitpod for free today.