I’ve done a ton of consulting as part of my work at Petabridge over the past 10 years and I run into developer onboarding problems constantly with new clients. It takes much longer than it should to clone a customer’s application from source control and successfully run it.
Continuous deployment and continuous integration (CI/CD) get a ton of attention in the DevOps space, but improving the “first run” experience for onboarding new team members is rarely mentioned in these spaces. A strong “first run” experience just as important and an essential ingredient to good CI/CD outcomes.
Bad “First Run” Experiences
If your “first run” experience is agonizing, this means your local development feedback loop is broken too even for experienced members of your team.
For instance, if I want to make a SQL schema change and test it, how easy is it for me to:
- Actually do that, in a local environment;
- Revert that change / change it again if I’m unhappy with it; and
- Verify that my change was safe or otherwise acceptable?
If your applications’ first run experience is any more complicated than git clone && run
1 then you have room to improve.