Backstage by Spotify is an open-source platform for building IDPs (internal developer portals). IDPs provide standardization and visibility for engineering teams and managers, as the single source of truth for status, ownership, and metrics on software projects. Teams often try Backstage when they have aspirations of “building anything and everything,” but run into problems when supporting “anything and everything” becomes a full-time job for multiple front and back-end engineers.

In modern engineering teams, lack of comprehensive data visibility can be a major problem. Without full insights into workflows, projects, and processes, issues can arise that create bottlenecks, increase costs, and hamper team productivity. Organizations have long measured company and business metrics, but now leaders want to understand how the engineering teams work from a data- and metrics-oriented approach.

Reporting from multiple engineering systems is crucial for maintaining the high velocity and quality standards required in today’s tech industry. However, creating reports can be challenging due to the need for deep technical expertise and aggregation of many separate systems worth of data.

From the Regulatory Lead to the Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and development team, there are quite a few individuals involved in keeping a Financial Technology (FinTech) company compliant. And there are quite a few regulations to stay in line with: anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC), payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS), the list goes on.

Engineering teams rely on certain metrics to assess their ability to deliver quality products, on time. This is a useful exercise, but execution has been lacking—with metric collation often handled via spreadsheet, or stand-alone tool. Neither approach is ideal for two reasons: 1) How—or more specifically where—metrics are collected silos them away from business context.

In an article titled The Worst Programmer I Know, Dan North, the creator of behavior-driven development, writes about a nearly fired developer he saved from the unemployment line. This developer consistently delivered zero story points, even though delivered story points was the primary metric for developer productivity at their (unnamed) software consultancy.

Businesses today have more access to information about their products and engineering teams than ever before, and the push to be data-driven is also at an all-time high. Engineering metrics can provide actionable insights that help accelerate technology and business impact.

This blog is a summary of Frost & Sullivan's extensive report on Cortex as the recipient of the Technology Innovation Leadership award for North American Internal Developer Portals. Read the full report here.

Developers are builders by nature (and profession), so many take pride in building their own solutions to problems from first principles, often using tools developed in open-source projects. So as Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) increased in popularity, it should come as no surprise that interest in open source IDPs increased in kind. While we may not yet have a fully opensource IDP platform, in this blog we’ll cover the open source components and platforms used to build IDPs from scratch.

Improving software health, security, and operational maturity are continuous programs—you’re never really “done” maintaining standards of quality. But what if specific parts of that program feel more urgent? Maybe you want to ensure all software has a README file attached, and at least 1 reviewer assigned... by next month? Hey, you gotta start somewhere!