Developer Experience (DX)
Developer experience (DX) is the key differentiator in this digital transformation journey as the partner ecosystems evolve. The greatest example is FinTech landscape where banks and financial institutions have come from No-innovation to All-digital now. Open API Specification, OAuth security protocols, and other industry standards & best practices are getting to a maturity level where API based system integrations can not only provide solution flexibility but also speed to market never seen before. Back-office and frontend integrations are going to be extremely visible from every aspect of the project lifecycles.
Back in the days, Business To Business (B2B) used to be the most boring back-office integration development and developers would feel either secured or scared to get pigeon-holed using tools like EDI, ETL etc. For decades supply chains have been dictating file based integrations with batch processing as the only option and thus protecting their investments in expensive networks and tools. Direct To Consumer (D2C), on the other hand, enjoyed modern integrations all along with service oriented, enterprise service bus, and microservice architecture patterns. Developers enjoyed learning and using these shiny skills resulting in innovations in frontend as well as API development aligned with cloud, mobile, and SaaS strategies.
But, recently, B2B has been merging with D2C in Channel Marketing space and there may not be much of a difference left in back-office and frontend integrations anymore. API based integrations can solve the same problems where batch files were used before. This is making the developers require a much broader understanding of the business domain and event sequences. New ecosystems and partnerships are emerging to monetize data and services at unprecedented scale. With Agile style software development practices, engineering and product teams are solving business problems together and event-driven architecture is a natural fit to design any business process.
Given the demand-supply gap of the mythical full-stack developers and implementation gaps even if you find one or two there, when it comes to actual value delivered to the users and business, there is major lack of alignment between the frontend and and backend developers. On top of that we need to constantly change and upgrade the underlying frameworks and architectures for future-proofing. This makes the Back-office and frontend integrations in the front and center of developer experience as well as product development priority.
My personal opinion on this journey is any organization should have a DX Strategy just like Mobile, Cloud, ML/AI etc. DX is a very tangible and visible value from the vantage point of the Marketing. Its high time the IT management either clear the way to the gig-economy of API integrations to just play out or participate with Sales to facilitate the make and/or buy decision from the marketplace with Software as a service and cloud-based offerings (SaaS), enterprise content management systems (CMS), or build their own one-stop-shop portals for the developers. The ecosystem demands much richer interactions as the new generation of developers are way more social and influential to make DX as the main product differentiator.
