Letter from Docker CEO 

"Shift Left": Great Soundbite, Bad Outcomes for Developers

Scott Johnston, CEO, Docker

Over the course of my 11 years at Docker I observe that our industry, in the spirit of advocating for developers, has aggressively promoted a "shift left" perspective. The well-intentioned view is, "developers know more than managers about dependencies, user needs, non-functional requirements ... let's give them more and more context, ownership, and tasks in order to improve outcomes later in the SDLC!"

While I know this is well-intentioned, what I’ve seen in many of our customers is that this approach has resulted in deluging developers with waves of requirements, alerts, notifications, pull requests, and much much more from SDLC stages further right, or downstream, from developers, eg, DevOps, Security, Deployment, etc. And since most developers are already over-worked, this additional context, ownership, and tasks from many different tools and pipeline stages more often than not simply increases their cognitive load and extends their workday.

Start With The Developer

Seeing this, we began asking ourselves, instead of "shift left" what if we instead started with the developer? Start with understanding the dependencies in their existing apps and existing pipeline tools? Start with not only giving them insight into the risks they may introduce with new libraries or modules they may wish to use, but also suggesting lower risk alternatives?

Far from serving only developers, in this approach their managers also win. In fact, bricks-and-mortar industries, such as automobile manufacturing, discovered from decades of experience that addressing issues at the point at which they're created is the fastest, lowest-cost, lowest-risk approach to remediate. This philosophy is encapsulated in the Kanban "go to the Gemba" mandate, in which *any* line manufacturing employee may stop production for any reason, any time. And when they do so they are not reprimanded - quite the opposite; instead, all relevant employees and managers gather at that employees' workstation to understand, ideate, and remediate the issue in real-time. (Having lived in Japan early in my career as a software engineer I had the privilege of experiencing this up close … it’s quite a mindset change!)

Now, all companies are taking this approach with software development to some extent but the developers don’t just stop the production line - they also identify the root causes of issues and fix them. This additional ownership combined with additional context, automation, and tooling can significantly improve a developer's workflow, productivity, and happiness.

Developer First

I was really excited that we pivoted our company to be “developer first” in 2019. Guided by this North Star, we set to work. From Docker Scout recommending fixes you could apply with one click in your IDE (rather than just nagging you with unclear notifications) to Docker Testcontainers Cloud fighting “works on my machine” by helping dev teams maintain identical test environments locally and in CI.

Or fighting to make this famous XKCD cartoon on compiling wait times a thing of the past with Docker Build Cloud (Though I promise I don’t wish to compress coffee breaks).

Or simply just trying to make Docker Desktop the fastest and simplest it can be.

Watch This Space - More To Come Soon!

As development teams remain the cornerstone for the creation of new applications, I’m fired-up that there is so much more we can do together as a community to empower them. Stating the obvious, GenAI is a technology that is massively disrupting everything - very positively, from my perspective - and it opens up so many more ways in which we can help developers do their best work.

For example, with minimal overhead GenAI brings to the developer’s inner loop codebase summarization, code completion, and automated generation of documentation, boilerplates, and unit tests, to mention but a few. While early, I’m seeing in our early adopter customers how this is already completely reshaping how development teams approach challenges like modernizing legacy applications, building secure and scalable cloud-native apps, and accelerating app delivery. 

From my POV, GenAI is the next “killer tech” behind a new wave of “developer first” tools.

I’m incredibly excited about the road ahead and working together with the developer community to make it happen!