Beware the 'Rot' of Your Development Environment

Just like in nature, software rots — and it's not only the code that decays, but the Development Environment itself, which grows more complex and rots over time. This is very hard for developers to notice, but it ultimately becomes a critical cause of slowing down product development speed.

Key strategies to prevent development environment rot include the following:

• Managing the on-boarding experience: You should minimize the time it takes for a new developer to set up their local environment. Repl.it used containers to cut this down to under 15 minutes, and it's recommended to keep it within 1 hour if possible.
• Measuring workflow efficiency: Measure the entire process from code checkout to testing, CI runs, and merging, aiming to shorten this process to under 10 minutes.

Also, rather than indiscriminate automation, it's important to build a Culture of automation. Instead of wasting productivity trying to automate everything, you should identify points where bugs are frequent or where developers actually feel pain, and introduce automation at the right time.