Supporting the Developer Experience with Production Metrics

In continuous software engineering, systems are constantly updated and evolved, with small changes being deployed to production every day. These production systems can be a gold mine of data on how the system is operating. While application performance management (APM) tools are now commonly used in industrial practice to record such data, often in very large quantities, we see a need to convert this data into useful information, and to present it to developers within their regular development environment, in a context sensitive way. When a developer is working on a particular piece of code, we want to tell them how that particular piece of code is currently behaving in production. In this position paper we present a road-map of ideas for how new tools could be developed that harness this data, and present it back to developers in an actionable form, where they can use it to inform decisions about the impact of potential changes, as they work with the code day to day.