When considering or advocating for an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) within your organization, assessing potential impact is an exciting, but sometimes challenging endeavor, especially considering the broad set of use cases IDPs support and the lack of context and visibility before the presence of an IDP. Maybe you understand the inherent value of an IDP, but need to quantify the estimated savings/impact to justify the spend.

Engineering’s gotten really complicated. The rush to “innovate or die” created more code, more tools, and more teams—without a single, unifying way to keep it all healthy and moving. The result? Orphaned services, slow releases, and endless overhead... just to name a few.

The terms engineering excellence and developer experience are often used in ways that make them seem interchangeable. While these concepts do overlap, it’s important to understand that developer experience (DX) is just one subset of engineering excellence, not a one-to-one match. Below, we define engineering excellence, clarify what developer experience entails, and explore how improving developer experience supports—but does not replace—the broader objectives of engineering excellence.

Engineering teams might face the technical hurdle of legacy system dependencies or they might worry about downtime during deployments. This article dives into these challenges and provides strategies to overcome them.

The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) report is an annual study that provides data-driven insights into what drives high performance in technology organizations. DORA originated as a team at Google, focused on increasing velocity, performance, and collaboration in DevOps. Drawing on feedback from over 39,000 professionals globally, the 2024 report categorizes the practices and metrics that define high-performing teams in two higher-level groups.

To ensure progress towards this ideal state, OKRs (objectives and key results) are often used to create tangible goalposts along the way. For engineering teams, these objectives often take two forms: But all of these programs involve moving from one state to another. As simple as that sounds, the act of doing so, successfully, has become incredibly challenging. Just understanding current state requires a ton of manual effort: Who owns what? What needs to change? Who’s going to do it?

Engineering teams are under constant pressure to deliver software that aligns with top line business goals: Unlocking Innovation, Reducing Costs, and Improving Customer Experiences. But how do organizations ensure their engineering practices actually move the needle? The answer lies in measuring both inputs (the practices teams adopt) and outputs (the results they achieve).

“Developer experience” is the buzzword, hot topic, and must-address area. Countless tools and platforms have emerged, each promising to help developers “ship faster” by reducing bottlenecks and improving workflows.

Learn how to measure and improve developer productivity with actionable tips, key metrics, and strategies for long-term success in software development.