FEATURE : SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
THE RESULT OF THIS IS TEAMS THAT CANNOT MANAGE ALL THE TASKS THAT THEY ARE EXPECTED TO ACCOMPLISH . DELIVERY SLOWS TO A CRAWL AS TEAMS STRUGGLE TO LEARN AND DELIVER ON THESE DIVERSE REQUIREMENTS THAT ARE SO NEW AND FOREIGN TO THEM .
quickly reverting to the outdated strategy of having highly specialised teams providing specific skills and expertise . However , since this is happening in such an ad-hoc fashion , these specialised teams are overburdened and cannot service the rest of the organisation effectively .
Yet again , delivery is slowed down even further . Additionally , the animosity and unhappiness that results from this slowdown are dangerous for the longterm success of the overall enterprise .
Consistency and standards
Way forward
As described above , the goal of any solution will be to balance the need for software teams to own the endto-end solutions that they are building whilst adequately balancing the cognitive load placed on them .
Here is the concept of an Internal Developer Platform , IDP . The goal of this tool is to fundamentally behave as an internal shopfront of best practices , patterns , and tooling that an organisation can expose to its teams . Before discussing how an Internal Developer Platform can solve the problems mentioned above , here are a few characteristics of an Internal Developer Platform .
• Internal Developer Platform is not simply a central repository of documentation . It is a collection of working software templates that can be used repeatedly to account for the repetitive , yet complicated , foundations of a specific type of software architecture .
• The goal of any Internal Developer Platform must be to improve the experience of the teams and developers in each organisation . Just as product development places a massive focus on User Experience , so too must an Internal Developer Platform place great importance on the developer experience , DevEx .
• Although the Internal Developer Platform is a product that is exposed to the organisation , it cannot be allowed to ignore the feedback from its users . As with any product , the feedback that the Internal Developer Platform receives from its customers is what it allows it to evolve with the organisation and continue to provide a useful service to the organisation .
Once teams become fed-up with the slow pace with which specialist teams , such as security , DevOps , networking , action their requirements , they decide to go it alone and implement the various requirements themselves . The end-to-end ownership of a problem is admirable but , teams create a massive sprawl of tools , technologies , and processes that can oftentimes create far more headaches down the line .
It makes it almost impossible for operations teams to maintain systems eventually without significant rework and even the most generic problem will often have hundreds of different solutions across an organisation . Additionally , this lack of standards is an ideal breeding ground for cost overruns and security vulnerabilities to grow . This results in teams entering an organisation and making mistakes that would have been easily avoided by people with those specialised skills .
Here is how Internal Developer Platform can help to solve the critical issues listed previously .
The goal of the Internal Developer Platform is to provide patterns and templates of the basic yet complicated components of any modern , mature application . Additionally , since these patterns are working codebases , they allow a large amount of complexity to be abstracted away from teams . This results in a lower amount of expert knowledge required to build and configure these components .
As such , teams can rely on a lower level of understanding of these components whilst still being guaranteed that they are being implemented at the highest level of quality and best practice . The upshot of all of this is that teams can focus more on delivering real business value through applications and systems , rather than focusing on the details of areas they are not well-versed in .
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