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Thoughtworks is Collaborating with Spotify to Deliver Better Developer Effectiveness with Backstage

Thoughtworks is Collaborating with Spotify to Deliver Better Developer Effectiveness with Backstage

By: Tim Cochran, Technical Director and Corey Eastman, Principal Consultant

 

A key ingredient to a successful modern digital business is a focus on engineering culture. It is important to create an environment in which developers can be effective; they can use their time well, applying their energy and creativity to build useful, working software for their users. The current high demand for technology talent only serves to underscore the effect a healthy and effective engineering organization can have on motivating and retaining talent. 

 

Developer effectiveness optimization involves improving the core feedback loops that developers and teams experience. Thoughtworks takes a metrics-driven approach, using the four key metrics, along with others such as time-to-launch service, time-to-productivity for new employees and qualitative measures of developer satisfaction. A developer portal, such as backstage.io, is a strong enabler for improving these metrics. 

 

Backstage is an open-source platform for building developer portals — built by Spotify and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It has core features designed to empower teams and solve infrastructure complexity such as software catalogs, software templates and technical documentation.  Spotify has also created a marketplace where community created plug-ins can be found, such as CircleCI, GitHub, Jenkins and Tech Radar integrations.  

 

We’re excited to share that TELUS and Thoughtworks have already delivered a Backstage developer portal that is improving the developer experience for their 8,000 engineers. TELUS calls their portal Simplify to reflect their goal to simplify developers’ lives. It provides self-service onboarding for new team members and has become the “go-to place” to find answers about development and delivery at TELUS that together help development teams work more easily and effectively by surfacing information about tools, APIs and teams.

 

“Developer efficacy and efficiency is a high priority for TELUS. As a result, it was important to take a lean and agile approach to creating a unified and seamless TELUS experience for all our developers while also continuing to benefit from the community contributions and on-going development of Backstage,” said Steve Tannock, Director, Platform Technology & Tools at TELUS Digital. “The relationship Thoughtworks has with Spotify helped us achieve our stated goal of getting new developers up to speed more quickly, building a one-stop shop for all phases of our development cycle and reducing time to market of new releases.”

 

Learn more about the Backstage developer portal we delivered at TELUS.

 

We’re also excited to share that Thoughtworks is actively partnering with Spotify to provide technology and consulting services for companies that are digital-first and enterprises that are modernizing. With 27+ years of experience, Thoughtworks was chosen for our industry leadership in software development, DevOps and continuous delivery. 

 

We’re looking forward to working with Spotify and others in the Backstage community to make developers' lives easier and improve productivity. For more information, please contact us at deveffectiveness@thoughtworks.com.