Developer productivity

Streamlined coding and amplified results.

What is developer productivity?

Developer experience, or DevEx, refers to the overall experience and satisfaction of developers while working with a particular platform, framework, or toolset. It encompasses various aspects that directly impact developers' productivity, efficiency, and satisfaction throughout the software development lifecycle.

Developers need to be empowered to code without compromise, as their operational counterparts configure and support their development environments and applications from conception, coding, and through production in a secure, automated, and observable manner.

A positive developer experience is paramount as it directly impacts an organization's revenue by reducing inefficiencies, enhancing development velocity, ensuring software quality, mitigating risks, and fostering platform adoption and success.

Challenges to developer productivity

Organizational constraints

Enterprises today are plagued with challenges that affect their application development and delivery. Developers need to worry about the infrastructure their applications need to run on, the security of these applications, and in some cases, they have to modernize their applications to take advantage of the latest technologies. Couple this with limited resources and legacy processes, and application development velocity can significantly drop, putting you behind your competitors. These challenges compound in a multi-cloud world.

Workloads and cognitive challenges

Increased workloads and digital transformation pressures contributes to developer stress. Thanks to the breakneck speed of technology advancements, the cognitive load on developers is also higher than ever before, leading to burnout and significant loss in productivity.

Security challenges

Software supply chain attacks are a matter of when, not if, with a 742% annual increase in software supply chain attacks over the past 3 years. 45% of organizations worldwide will experience supply chain attacks by 2025, according to X. Software security must be incorporated early in the development lifecycle and cannot remain an afterthought anymore.

Core dimensions of developer productivity

Reduced cognitive load

Software development is inherently complex, and the ever-growing number of tools and technologies is further adding to the cognitive load faced by developers. Cognitive load encompasses the amount of mental processing required for a developer to perform a task. For example, cognitive load typically increases for a developer working on an inherently difficult or complex task, or learning to understand an unfamiliar development framework. Cognitive load also varies according to how external information is presented and increases when mental processing is required for translating information into longer-term domain knowledge and models.

Maximized flow state

Developers often speak of "getting into the flow" or "being in the zone." Such statements colloquially describe the concept of flow state, a mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment. Frequent experiences of flow state at work lead to higher productivity, innovation, and developer joy. Similarly, studies have shown that developers who enjoy their work perform better and produce higher-quality products. Interruptions and delays—which relate to the feedback loops dimension—are important factors that hinder a developer's ability to experience flow state. Other factors include maintaining autonomy over work structure, having clear team and project goals, and engaging in stimulating and challenging tasks.

Efficient feedback loop

Software organizations commonly look for ways to optimize their value stream by reducing or eliminating delays in software delivery. This allows faster feedback and learning about what is being built, which in turn allows for more rapid course correction. Studies have consistently shown that organizations deploying more frequently and maintaining shorter lead times are twice as likely to exceed performance goals as their competitors. Shortening feedback loops—the speed and quality of responses to actions performed—is equally important to improving DevEx. A typical developer's day consists of numerous tasks relying on feedback from both tools and people.

Keys to a successful developer experience

For a successful project, application developers need to work with platform engineers and DevSecOps. The complete lifecycle of a project needs to be efficiently executed, from the inner loop—where developers are coding on their own—to the outer loop that includes all the processes needed beyond the application development through production deployment.

The inner and outer loop approach propels individuals with cutting-edge tools to experiment and iterate within their personal sandbox. Simultaneously, the outer loop harmonizes team collaboration with unwavering quality assurance. Automated pipelines orchestrate rigorous testing, code reviews, and robust security checks, ensuring code adheres to the highest standards. Organizations can build and deliver secure and stable applications, with increased trust and compliance.

Inner loop: Speed and agility

Focus areas: Individual developer experience, rapid code changes, embedded security early on, and immediate feedback.
Benefits: Faster iteration cycles, quicker bug fixes, and rapid prototyping.
- Leverage IDE plugins for static code analysis and vulnerability detection for secure coding practices.
- Empowers developers with personalized tools and workflows.
- Drives innovation and experimentation.

Outer loop: Rigorous validation, integration, quality, and collaboration

Focus areas: Team-wide collaboration, quality assurance, and adherence to standards.
Benefits: Ensures code quality and stability through rigorous testing and review.
- Security scanning and compliance checks.
- Promotes consistency and compliance with organizational policies.
- Facilitates knowledge sharing and best practices across teams.

Explore developer productivity with us

Supercharge Java development

Create scalable, security-focused Java apps for hybrid cloud platforms. Explore application runtimes and frameworks that give you the flexibility to build your application with the right runtime, framework, language, and architectural style, on your desired platform.

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Cloud-native application development and delivery platform

A cloud-native application platform empowers development teams to adopt innovative cloud architectures including APIs, event-driven processing, and AI/ML.

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Develop for hybrid-cloud architecture

Hybrid cloud architecture combines a mixture of public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises infrastructure for storage and computing. It includes software components that connect these parts, enable them to communicate, deliver updates, ensure security, and help the organizations manage it all.

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Automate your application's middleware

Discover the benefits of using automation to build, deploy, and manage multi-cloud application infrastructure at scale. Automation can help with provisioning, lifecycle management and reporting, and monitoring your app.

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Develop applications on Kubernetes

Kubernetes is the foundation of cloud software architectures like microservices and serverless. For developers, Kubernetes brings new processes for continuous integration and continuous deployment; helps you merge code; and automates deployment, operation and scaling across containers in any environment.

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Explore design architectures and patterns

Red Hat's portfolio architecture, solution patterns, and validated patterns provide developers and architects with architecture best practices, tools, and demos to handle common challenges. Discover solutions and patterns based on successful customer deployments, created by experts on the Red Hat hybrid cloud platform.

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Developer productivity tools

At Red Hat, we believe that developer experience is not just developer tools. That’s the first step. Developer experience is also the combination of communities, people, education, and programs to empower developers to make them more powerful through education, tutorial, sessions, and events.

Together, all of these elements create the Red Hat developer experience.

Red Hat products and tools for developers

Stable and portable environments

With 10 years of support, RHEL provides one of the most stable and portable operating systems for building applications. Along with Red Hat OpenShift, you can build, deploy, and run your applications anywhere, securely and at scale. Code with confidence with Red Hat runtimes and frameworks.

Single-pane of glass for ease of development

With Red Hat Developer Hub, get access to software templates, dynamic plug-ins, documentation, and software catalog to focus on cloud-native development.

Discover Red Hat OpenShift developer services

Discover products that allow developers to quickly and securely deliver applications to production.

Start your application development and your AI/ML journey without hassles

Sign up for our no-cost Developer Sandbox to start your application development without any setup. You can import your own code or get started with the guided activities and see Kubernetes in action. Get access to OpenShift AI within the sandbox to run your AI/ML workloads. Quick start with industry leading frameworks and languages such as Quarkus, node.js, react.js, and .NET. You can also set up the environment on your local machine with Red Hat OpenShift Local. Build, manage and deploy containers using Podman Desktop.

Power-up your favourite IDE with Developer tools, Integration frameworks, extensions and plug-ins

Boost your productivity with developer tools, extensions, and plug-ins. Connect applications and data across hybrid infrastructures set of integration and messaging technologies using Red Hat Integration. Manage your containers locally with Podman Desktop.

Red Hat products and tools for platform engineers

Write and deploy your code securely with trusted content

Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain accelerates software supply chain security by bringing Red Hat’s own mature, open source software supply chain as a cloud service for development and security teams to instantly adopt with low effort and cost.

Automate anything, anywhere with AI

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allows developers to set up automation to provision, deploy, and manage compute infrastructure across cloud, virtual, and physical environments. With Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant, you can get curated suggestions from generative AI in your IDE as you create the content.

Seamless onboarding

Red Hat Developer Hub is an enterprise-grade platform for building developer portals, containing a supported and opinionated framework. By implementing a unified and open platform designed to maximize developer skills, ease onboarding, and increase development productivity, you can focus on what really matters: writing great code.