process management blog posts

Next-gen developer experience

Blog: OpenText

Greetings from Goose, a trusted partner for your AI journey. This AI-generated goose has been the champion of seven-star experiences, and over the last few months he’s focused in on the needs and wants of the next generation of developers.

You: How many lines of code do you think it takes to run a modern car or an airplane?

GOOSE: Probably more than 100 million lines of code.

You: Crazy, why so many?

GOOSE: Because we can. But more importantly, because autonomous driving and flying entail machine-led decisions that depend on many, many lines of code with logic.

You: For job security, as a developer, this is a good thing, right?

GOOSE: Honk! It is, and it isn’t. The fact that many companies are becoming software companies means there is going to be a tsunami of innovation. The increasing significance of software in so many industries means that we will reach labor and talent constraints for developing applications.

You: So what should we be thinking about?

GOOSE: First, embrace that software development and delivery is a lifecycle that has to be managed at scale to provide a solid foundation for developers. Your developers benefit from various tasks in the lifecycle being on a single platform for software development – planning, requirements gathering, design, coding, testing, development, deployment, maintenance.

You: But what happens when we don’t have enough resources to innovate?

GOOSE: You then need to embrace what generative AI can do for your software engineers with today’s tools. Find code blocks, suggest bug fixes, auto-generate test cases, auto-generate technical documentation, bring in opensource code, localize, etc.

You: What about security?

GOOSE: Honk again!! That’s an important part of elevating the developer experience. Code security, screening, and recovery must be implemented throughout the lifecycle.

You: Does all of this really make it a better experience for my developers?

GOOSE: When you let the machines do the work, you can 10x the productivity of your developers. The real unlock is taking away the mundane tasks, and letting your smart engineers focus on creative problem solving and innovation around the next thing.

From DevSecOps to nextgen experience

Amongst developers, the notion of DevSecOps is not new. But with the boom of AI, there is a new conversation to be had. Can DevSecOps create new value for the company? Or is the real value to be gained in retaining top talent in software engineering by creating productive work environments?

Jobs are abundant and jobs are being made obsolete. The next generation of developer experience needs to look beyond current roles to future roles. Generative AI can now find bugs, generate code patches, create test cases, and perform the tests; the human roles must also evolve from point tasks to software delivery. Strategy, planning, interoperability, and dependencies across applications and multiple data environments become the higher value tasks. When the tools assist with the basics, “developers” will graduate to “software engineers” and their needs will change. Lines of code become the job of the machine, and the humans focus on creative design, quality assurance, and resource management.

Next, the scenarios become more complex. When a single vehicle or aircrafts requires 100 million lines of code to operate, there are many points of potential failure. What use to be functional and performance testing of an application will graduate into a new category of quality assurance.
• How do 10 to 20 different applications work seamlessly together to execute a task?
• How do we run end-to-end testing down the assembly line to ensure it does?
• How do we ensure code-security scanning is embedded throughout the process?
• How do we test against functionality, performance and load, vulnerabilities and threats in the most optimal sequence and manner?
• How must we evolve product management to incorporate software upgrades and releases? What should be automated and what should require human decisions?

When we let the machines do the work and the paradigm shift happens, understanding developer productivity is going to be key. Ask yourself and your engineering teams these questions:
• How do we measure productivity today?
• What should we measure to drive more creativity and innovation?
• What does good look like beyond completion of the task?
• What can be done by the machine vs. the human to improve that productivity?
• What does developer experience at scale look like for us?

Learn more about how you can get started with OpenText™ ValueEdge™, OpenText™ Fortify™, and OpenText™ DevOps Aviator. These new solutions enable businesses to reimagine the developer experience and embrace code security. The future of autonomous decisions and letting the machines do the work with AI assistants will shift the world of software lifecycle management. The profession of software engineering will continue to evolve at rapid pace. Don’t be left behind.


Watch the five-minute Value Edge and DevOps Aviator demo. View OpenText World Europe keynotes for more information. Visit www.opentext.com.

The post Next-gen developer experience appeared first on OpenText Blogs.