D2L's platform team chooses DX for complete insights into engineering productivity

At D2L, creators of D2L Brightspace (a leading LMS software for online learning and teaching), the platform engineering team focuses on enabling their product teams to accelerate delivery and improve reliability. However, understanding the day-to-day lives of developers is challenging. D2L’s platform team was aware of some of the problems developers were facing; however, they weren’t concretely sure about what should be prioritized. At the same time, they had major projects underway and wanted to make sure the developer experience would be at least the same, if not better, after these projects were completed.

“We had talked about getting a product to keep a pulse on our engineering group for a long time,” says Matt Pinelli, a key member of the platform organization. “We looked at a few different options, and DX was the one that fit our needs.”

While evaluating options for getting insights, it was clear to the platform engineering team that they needed a way to capture sentiment so they could understand the problems developers were experiencing. Other vendors they evaluated were more quantitative-based, however, and centered on visualizing metrics from tools like GitHub and Jira. When they were referred to DX from another customer, they realized DX was aligned with the approach they were looking for.

“We found that the other vendors looked at qualitative data as an afterthought,” Pinelli says. “Whereas DX puts the qualitative data at the forefront and uses quantitative data to give you more context.”

The challenge with not having both types of information, Pinelli says, is that “if you don’t have both together, it’s very hard to get the full picture. In fact, if you only have the quantitative data, it could be very easy to move off in the wrong direction.”

DX offered a few additional features that D2L didn’t see in the other products they evaluated:

• Onboarding insights, which include self-reported and system-based metrics on the onboarding experience and ramp-up time. “We didn’t have visibility into that before,” Pinelli says.
• The Atlas knowledge base, which gives teams curated best practices and guidance on steps they can take to improve while they’re viewing results. “Atlas gives us a good jumping-off point to make improvements quickly.”
• Triage is a feature that teams use to select areas they plan to focus on themselves and where they need support (such as from the platform team). “The triaging functionality is really helpful so we can identify common threads where teams are having issues and where support is needed.”
• Interviews is a feature that the platform team can use to get targeted feedback about a specific tool or project they’re working on. “DX’s SmartTarget feature is a great way to help ensure we are engaging with team members who will provide valuable input.”

“These were things you wouldn’t get with quantitative-focused tools,” Pinelli adds. D2L’s platform engineering team plans to continue using DX to make sure they’re working on the right problems, that they’re making improvements, and that they’re having the biggest impact for as many developers as possible. The ultimate goals are to reduce time loss from developers’ workdays and improve delivery speed and quality.