Debugging company Rookout surveyed developer and DevOps managers in the cloud-native space to get a better view of how increased pressure to digitally transform is impacting their ability to form and maintain successful teams. 

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According to the report, the five challenges managers are struggling with are:

  1. Maintaining productivity and velocity. As more development moves toward microservices and serverless structures, development teams are struggling to make technologies visible and troubleshoot their applications. “The complexity they bring demands a steep learning curve, and one of their main value points — namely, the abstraction they provide between the application code and the hardware the application is running on — also raises new challenges when attempting to troubleshoot the application without access to the hardware they run on,” the report started. 
  2. Resolving customer issues in a timely manner. Engineering teams that are not properly equipped to handle customer issues become apathetic to problems. They need to clearly put a face and a name to an issue, see how much the issue is impacting the bottom line, and align with the business. “Once engineers are equipped to help the customer, they start seeing benefits to the business and end customers. It is becoming much more motivating to help resolve those issues and ties the loop back in to focus, understand and align with the business,” said Liran Haimovitch, CTO and co-founder of Rookout.
  3. Balancing speed and quality. When working in a distributed development environment, it can be hard for developers to balance velocity and quality. Leaders are measuring development on their ability to meet deadlines, make customers happy, and find as many bugs as fast as possible. 
  4. Teamwork and collaboration in a distributed environment. Teams are having trouble debugging and developing efficient code in a distributed environment. They need tools where they can collaborate, have access to the same information, and share knowledge. 
  5. Remote debugging: Traditional debuggers don’t work in a distributed environment. “The solution is adopting the proper tool: a modern debugging solution that’s built for cloud-native applications. Developers will be able to get the data they need from their code, no matter where it’s running, and while their code is running live,” the report stated.