Wasted developer time costs businesses billions
UK businesses are inadvertently wasting over £10.4 billion ($12.97 billion) each year as developers manually carry out routine operations tasks that could be automated.
Software delivery platform Harness calculates the figure based on the fact that developers spend only around 52 minutes a day on actual coding.
The rest of their time is taken up with tasks like unnecessary scripting, manual deployments, inefficient testing processes, and responding to a variety of security issues across the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
"We are facing a developer experience crisis," says Nick Durkin, field CTO at Harness. "Repetitive tasks such as the maintenance of unnecessary scripts, repetitive manual testing and waiting times for builds to complete, are keeping organizations' best developers from the critical work of coding. This toil is driving huge inefficiencies across the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), minimizing the impact of developer talent and stalling critical digital transformation projects. It could even lead to burnout, or push an organization's most skilled resources to seek more engaging roles with another employer. Organizations must act now to improve the developer experience, empowering them to do what they do best; turn ideas from concept to reality."
By investing in AI and machine learning within CI/CD pipelines, organizations can reduce the burden of routine and repetitive software delivery tasks, freeing up engineers’ time for more skilled work. For example, by automating complex deployments and utilizing ML for deployment verification to monitor for vulnerabilities or abnormalities in an application’s behaviour, organizations can reduce the strain on developers, enabling them to release new features quickly and safely.
"IT budgets are increasingly under scrutiny, but organizations still need to bring reliable and secure innovation to their customers. Firms must therefore find new efficiencies and address the current imbalance, by optimizing developer workflows to achieve speed within approved guardrails," adds Durkin. "By focusing their efforts on improving the developer experience with increased automation, organizations can unlock the full potential of their most skilled innovators, by enabling them to build and deploy software quickly with governance, reliability, and security already incorporated. Empowering developers to harness modern techniques such as chaos engineering, feature flagging, and shift-left security testing will bring further advantages to innovation, by bridging the gap between development, operations, and security teams. Ultimately, these improvements will help organizations to drive greater developer satisfaction and avoid burnout, ensuring digital transformation stays on track and they can get ahead of the competition."
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