The concept of developers working together at long tables in physical spaces to code software was certainly the norm one year ago. The idea of remote development was more the exception than the rule. That was so 2019.

“The idea of remote working was like an oddity,” said Jeffrey Hammond (pictured), vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “There was a list on GitHub of companies that supported remote developers, and it was maybe 100 at that point. Now, in 2020, every company is a remote development company.”

Hammond spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the DevOps Virtual Forum. They discussed the need for a more disciplined approach to team collaboration and the challenges confronting managers in measuring DevOps productivity. (* Disclosure below.)

Increasing innovation and quality

The realities of the COVID-19 world have forced companies to maximize productivity and efficiency while boosting innovation and software quality at the same time. This represents a challenge for many organizations, and how to address this successfully will be a focus of the DevOps Virtual Forum on November 18.

“All of those investments in physical spaces to support cross-functional co-located teams aren’t something that we’re able to take advantage of today,” Hammond said. “It’s forcing them to focus on what I would call ‘spiritual’ co-location, because physical co-location is no longer an option. As a result, it’s forcing companies to become even more disciplined with respect to the things that they do to help development teams work together.”

A greater focus on discipline involves enabling DevOps managers to measure outcomes instead of mere activity, since the days of people working closely in one workspace are long gone. It is also difficult to measure what can’t be seen.

“I’ve been getting a lot of questions from large development shops about: ‘How do I make sure employees are still productive now that I can’t see them? Should I be ensuring individual productivity?’” Hammond said. “My answer is I don’t think so. You want to be able to measure the team level, but you may want to allow individuals to look at their own productivity metrics and benchmark themselves. So, the way that managers work changes significantly, and that’s one of the things that we’ll talk about in November.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the DevOps Virtual Forum. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the DevOps Virtual Forum. Neither Broadcom Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE