Developer Experience Roadmap thoughts

• Current things

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    • Jenkins optimizations

    • Automated Python and JS dependency upgrades

    • Feature toggle reporting

• Ideas

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  • Further automation of dependency upgrades

    • Some possible solutions

      • Auto-merge and auto-deploy

      • Bulk-upgrade tool

      • Automated async-upgrade tool

    • Auto-releasing of libraries

      • Automate mechanics of releases

    • Find changelogs on external dependencies

    • Further investment in renovate - get feedback from current users

  • Developer experience observations and “design sprint”

  • Docs (?)

  • Tests

    • Slow in multiple repos (e-commerce and edx-platform) for different reasons

    • Analyze our tests

      • Coverage.py 5.0

        • Who tests what map

      • Can then remove tests

        • To minimize updating tests

        • To minimize running tests

    • Optimizing which tests run for a PR

  • Data

    • Test Data OEP

      • Standardizes on schema

      • Reference example

  • Micro-frontends on Devstack

  • Configuration

    • Simplify config pipeline

      • Devops has done some foundational work

      • Needs follow-up to simplify for developer experience

  • A/B testing enablement

    • bi-toolkit-repo has some tooling

    • Don’t have

      • Automatically running reports

    • Optimizely/segment training for developers

  • Ownership enablement

    • Observability tooling, for example

    • “Alerts are much more useful than dashboards”

      • Devops alerts auto-create tickets

  • PR status

    • “Why is my commit not on Prod yet?”

    • Possibly: improve GoCD pipeline status reporting/monitoring

    • Possibly: also gather data and metrics on PR lifecycles

Startup time on edx-platform

• Legacy Shopping cart - 20% of startup

• Scanning for entry points - also significant time

  • Specifically, stevedore-based plugins (xblocks, course-tabs, django-app-plugins)

  • Seems we might be scanning twice

  • Can we move to more configurable Django-style list?

• Studio outages - when rebooting for remote config changes

Hackathon Brainstorming

• Deprecated frameworks

  • Python 2

  • Node 8

• Performance of student dashboard