Introduction
Developer onboarding essentially boils down to educating a new teammate on your software development lifecycle (SDLC) so that they can deliver software. According to the Society for Human Resources Management, about 70% of new employees in the US stay at a company for more than three years if they have a positive, well-structured onboarding experience. This also boosts their productivity and retention rates to 58% and 60%, respectively.
But if you’ve ever onboarded a new teammate — or have been onboarded yourself — you know how time-intensive a task this can be. Sometimes, you spend more time answering questions and providing feedback to a new developer than performing tasks associated with your actual role.
Onboarding a new developer consumes so much time and resources that it often appears as its own task in a sprint, which takes away time the team could be spending working on new features. On the flip side, the new developer already has to learn so much about their company culture, policies and colleagues — the last thing they need is an inefficient onboarding experience!
In this post, we’ll discuss how an internal developer portal will streamline your onboarding experience and address numerous onboarding challenges.
Challenges with onboarding new
Though we’ve briefly discussed the high-level challenges that come with onboarding new developers, there are specific pain points that an internal developer portal can solve. These include:
- Lack of defined onboarding processes: The biggest factor in retaining employees in the long term is the quality of their onboarding process, but many are not likely to have well-defined processes.
- Provisioning tools, access control and visibility: A new developer must be given access to every part of their new software development lifecycle (SDLC). They also may not be able to see other related services in certain tools unless they are given full edit permissions, which can introduce unnecessary risk. Overall, it can sometimes take up to 10 days to grant a new developer access to all of the services they need.
- Understanding the code & related software instructure: Every application is unique and complex! Understanding the relationships between different services, runtime resources, and engineering teams can take months to grasp.
- Providing tasks and templated actions: The end goal of onboarding is to add an effective new member to your team — what better way is there than to provide them exactly what they need to get started? Templated tasks and actions make developers autonomous much more quickly, reducing their time to productivity.
