Blog
December 14, 2023
Revolutionizing DevOps at Dell: Developer Experience & Productivity at its Best
DevOps,
Data Management
In this blog, we share an example from a recent webinar on how Dell flipped developer productivity from 20/80 to 80/20. Keep reading to discover the methods you can use and results you can gain by doing the same thing.
Why Dell Needed to Flip the Developer Productivity Script
If I told you that your manufacturing plant was only producing at 20% capacity, would you close down the plant? Or at least call a search party to investigate? I am willing to bet that you would.
But why is it that we are willing to accept any less when it comes to some of our most valuable resources, who are so vital to our digital transformation? Why would any organization allow their business-critical software development team to operate at sub-par productivity? And yet, we see this every day.
The team at Dell decided: no more. As Dell was embarking on a large-scale digital transformation, the IT executive team knew that they must adopt DevOps practices at scale. But they were in for a surprise. They discovered that their developer productivity was blocked by tedious administrative and manual tasks and processes. So much so, that Dell developers were only spending 20% of their time actually writing functional code! Imagine that! The software development leadership team made it their mission to dramatically accelerate developer productivity by reimagining the developer experience at Dell.
At our webinar, we had the pleasure of hosting Cody Taylor, the driving force behind the DevOps transformation at Dell. This conversation with Cody offers a firsthand account of how Cody and team re-engineered the developer experience at the heart of an epic DevOps journey at Dell. The organization needed to transform while continuously supporting over 2700 software applications with more than 420 PB of data, processing 63 million orders and 84 thousand shipments while empowering 130 thousand Dell team-members, working flexibly.
Back to top5 Ways Dell Flipped Developer Productivity
Here are five of the many DevOps learnings that Cody shares in this webinar:
- Automate, automate, automate: Foster an ‘automate first’ mentality and culture. Deliver ‘everything as code’, not just the software but also infrastructure and data.
- API-first developer self-service: Give developers self-service access to systems and tools using APIs only. Manual dependencies and development bottlenecks are eliminated.
- Integrate pipeline toolchain: Streamline end-to-end pipelines by integrating tools, all the way from requirements management to observability and data automation across.
- Offer a developer marketplace: Build a rich internal marketplace offering developers standardized UX components and self-service APIs as well as cloud services.
- Remove data friction: Eliminate manual and painstaking steps related to test data by automating the provisioning and management of data and integrating TDM into pipelines
The Results of Improving Dell's Developer Productivity?
By following these best practices and others, Cody and team have reached phenomenal results using Perforce Delphix solutions for test data management. Five of the key metrics realized by the team at Dell include:
- 17 minutes to create a pipeline.
- 6000 self-service data access requests and 80% of provisioning done by developers.
- Improved provisioning time from months to minutes.
- Developers spend over 75% of their time writing functional code.
- 50 Million CI/CD pipeline job runs to date.
To learn more from the experts at Dell about how you too, can accelerate your DevOps journey, please check out the full on-demand webinar with Dell.
Ready to dive deeper into the results you could be achieving:
- Need to speed up development? Discover why improving development velocity is key.
- Need to automate provisioning? Get the test data management best practices.
- What other metrics should you consider to measure DevOps success? Consider DORA metrics.
- Need to automate at scale? Explore enterprise data automation in depth.
Transform Developer Productivity with Perforce Delphix Data Delivery
Like Dell's transformation from 20/80 to 80/20 productivity ratios, your development teams can achieve dramatic efficiency gains through better, faster data management. Perforce Delphix eliminates data bottlenecks that keep developers waiting by delivering production-like datasets in minutes instead of days or weeks.
Related blog >> What Is Delphix?
Data Virtualization Maximizes Development Time
Delphix addresses the core data virtualization challenges that impact enterprise development teams. By providing instant access to refreshed, consistent test data, developers spend more time coding and less time waiting for manual processes that slow innovation.
Self-Service Data Access Eliminates Dependencies
Virtual data copies enable developers to provision, refresh, and manage their own test environments without IT bottlenecks. This self-service approach removes the administrative bottlenecks that prevent teams from focusing on writing functional code.
Achieve Your Own 80/20 Developer Productivity Transformation
Discover how Delphix test data management solutions can replicate Dell's developer productivity success in your organization. Request a demo to see how automated data delivery transforms development workflows and maximizes your team's productive coding time.