{"id":17293,"date":"2019-05-17T16:06:50","date_gmt":"2019-05-17T15:06:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.devopsonline.co.uk\/?p=17293"},"modified":"2019-05-17T16:06:50","modified_gmt":"2019-05-17T15:06:50","slug":"its-time-to-build-a-better-software-developer-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devopsnews.online\/its-time-to-build-a-better-software-developer-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s time to build a better software developer experience"},"content":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s time to build a better software developer experience<\/em><\/p>\n The job of a software developer is constantly evolving as organisations transform to meet new digital realities. This isn\u2019t just true for developers of customer-facing technologies. As cloud-based solutions expand, they often require increased engagement with the mainframe, which means developers on IBM Z must also adapt to manage new business problems with greater quality, velocity and efficiency.<\/p>\n To do this, organisations must introduce a new path to engineering excellence that enables multi-platform developers to cut through the boring, unchallenging minutiae of day-to-day work so their energy can be invested in ideas, experimentation and innovation.<\/p>\n In short, the software developer experience needs to be transformed. Businesses need to look at what developers encounter when they analyse a COBOL program (Common Business Oriented Language), what happens when they edit, test and deploy code and what culture, processes and tools they are being offered.<\/p>\n These are key components to ensuring developers continuously improve at solving new business challenges that involve the mainframe.<\/p>\n If the traditional developer experience on the mainframe is still in use \u2013 notorious for siloed culture, rigid, experiment-averse processes and text-based ‘green screen’ tools \u2013 businesses can\u2019t expect to attract the talented next-gen programmers they desperately need to commit as the next stewards of their most mission-critical platform.<\/p>\n Businesses cannot count on talented new developers to pay a personal tax in time, effort and inspiration for digitally subpar culture, processes and tools in the face of escalating expectations. This is the same as hoping competitors will throttle their own innovation to ensure a rival organisation has time to catch up.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not going to happen.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no way to successfully transform an enterprise with Agile and DevOps practices without applying them across the entire organisation. Setting up developers with a culture of continuous improvement, processes that enable collaboration and agility and modern tools that integrate the mainframe into the DevOps toolchain increases the amount of energy and creativity they will put into solving business problems.<\/p>\n There are six key ways businesses can start building a better developer experience that will empower individuals to innovate with quality, velocity and efficiency and drive unique, competitive value to a business and its customers:<\/p>\n Customer-facing innovation is tied to business-critical mainframe code and data, and this can either be a constraint on innovation or a liberator of the value needed to achieve enterprise-level digital transformation.<\/p>\n Unleashing that value requires a transformation of the COBOL developer experience, which is only possible through modernising mainframe culture, processes and tools so developers can focus on innovation instead of managing the intricacies of the platform. It\u2019s time to make COBOL an essential challenge of a worthy endeavour.<\/p>\nTime for a new software developer experience<\/h3>\n
Modernise COBOL development<\/h3>\n
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COBOL<\/h3>\n