Singapore GovTech STACK Conference 2024 Day 1 (Part 2)

Following on from GovTech Singapore STACK 2024 Day 1, the third session of the day was from Suthen Thomas Paradatheth CTO @ Grab titled "Application Innvovation and Developer experience"

Question: Why do platforms matter?

Suthen very concisely and convincingly explained how platforms enable;

1. Better User Experience

2. Optimal Business Outcomes

3. Improved Developer Velocity

4. Scalable addressing of complexity in a "right first time" way

There were two key takeaways;

1. Get the boundaries right

2. Recognize sociotechnical aspects including recognition and contribution ownership

Suthen cited the book, Team Topologies by Manuel Pais (Team Topologies) 🇺🇦 🇵🇸 and Matthew Skelton as well as the "Reverse Conway Manouvere". The reverse conway manouvere modifies the organisation to optimise the software architecture, development flow and delivery.

Suthen described, how in 2015 much of the deployments in Grab were manual. He said that today with canary in production, Conveyor automates monitoring. Grab are now performing over 17,000 deployments per month across their tech stack.

Suthen highlighted some example enablers across 4 key pillars

1. Development - GrabKit (internal framework to standup microservices in GoLang)
2. Automated Deployment - CI-Kit and Conveyor
3. Infrastructure - MEKS and Doorman
4. Observability - Datadog and ELK

Suthen shared how Grab's platform approach facilitates economic empowerment across services including GrabFood, GrabTaxi, GrabExpress and GrabMart to find global optimals as well as reduce duplications provide better UX and better DevX.

Question: How do we get the boundaries right?

1. Reduce toil and undifferentiated heavy lifting
2. Identify competition for the sames resource such as a business stakeholder
3. Identify overlapping problem statements and solutions i.e reduce/abstract to algorithmic level

Question: How to resolve socio-technical problems?

Verticals fear loss of control. We can address this by taking a share from each vertical and forming a common team providing shared capability thereby allowing verticals to focus on their differentiators. Sometimes shared capability development for example x-as-a-service may only require a short term squad anyway.

Platform teams worry about high coordination overheads and how to measure their indirect impact to the business. We should give platform teams space to better frame the problem statement they are addressing and measure their inputs not outputs.

To address the high coordination overheads, platform teams need to define clear interaction modes.

The next session of the morning was by Gregor Hohpe of Architect Elevator titled "Perfectly Portable Productivity Propellants?"

Gregor stated that platform teams shouldn't be taking tickets directly from the vertical teams nor should they be part of other teams` development loops. He highlighted the importance of building abstractions not illusions.

In addition to his numerous and valid car analogies, he also shared a fruit analogy likening the platform team to supporting verticals developing a fruit salad rather than a fruit basket and how the platform teams should differentiate themselves from the cloud provider.

Finally there was a Panel Session titled "Gotchas and hurdles in a journey to empower Developer/Engineering productivity"

• Dominic Chan (DC) - CIO GovTech
• Sau Sheong (SS) CTO GovTech
• Gregor Hohpe (GH) - Elevator Architect
• Rachel Laycock (RL) - CTO thoughtworks

Question: Do you have advice on how to measure developer productivity?

Rachel - Move beyond coding, towards developing requirements, providing shared context, testing and support.

Question: Who owns the platform?

SS: Very complex. Don't underestimate the sociotechnical aspects. Need to be clear how changes affect the delivery team and their stakeholders.

RL: Shared ownership between product, development and platform teams. Take an inner source approach rather than technical capability.

GH: Functional, Operational and Account ownership should be defined up front

Question: How do we build the platform while also taking feedback from a diverse user group? How do we demonstrate the value of developer experience aside from reducing cost?

RL: Developers naturally like to be productive, we don't neccessarily need to motivate them. Not being able to work productively is frustrating. We need to look at the end-to-end process, improving the cognitive load. While developers like meta-work, shipping code and delivering features is what gets us going.

SS: Public sector has more diversity, even more than for example, Hewlett Packard with 320k staff, twice the size of Singapore's public service. Vertical businesses in private sector aim to produce revenue. Public sector divisions aim to deliver on policy intent and measure outcomes.

Think about the size of the team and the value delivered.

At lunch it was good to chat with Lixin Wang and Cheng Yong Teo from GovTech supporting Government Developer Productivity or GDP for short.

Following lunch we learnt from Brian Houck , Applied Scientist, Microsoft and Abi Noda CEO, DX about the SPACE framework to measure developer productivity across;

- Satisfaction & Well Being

- Performance

- Activity

- Communication & Collaboration

- Efficiency & Flow

Abi spoke about DORA, DevEx and the more recent, DX Core 4;

1. Speed
2. Effectiveness
3. Quality
4. Impact

Click here for more bonus material! STACK 2024 Day 1 - Bonus Material