Dx Audit

DX Audit

Find and fix the friction that taxes every engineer, every day. Developer experience compounds: a 10-minute CI queue on a 20-person team burns weeks of engineering time per month, and worse, it changes behavior — engineers batch changes, skip test runs, and avoid touching areas with slow feedback. Boundary: technical-debt-review audits the code's health; this skill audits the workflow around the code — loops, tooling, environments, and onboarding.

Workflow

Step 1: Measure the Loops — Numbers Before Anecdotes

Quantify the feedback loops before collecting opinions, so the audit ranks by data and the improvement is provable later:

• Inner loop: cold build, incremental build, single-test run, hot-reload — time them yourself in the actual repo.
• Outer loop: CI wall-clock (queue + run, from real recent pipelines), PR time-to-first-review and time-to-merge, deploy lead time (DORA overlap — metrics-and-okrs).
• Flake rate: retries and "re-run job" clicks per week; a 5%-flaky suite means engineers already ignore red.
• Onboarding: time from laptop to first merged PR for recent joiners.

Step 2: Collect the Friction Log

Then ask the engineers — a lightweight survey or five 15-minute conversations: "what wastes your time every day?", "what do you avoid doing because it's painful?", "what would you fix first?". The second question matters most: avoidance signals (never running the full suite locally, dreading a service's local setup, batching deploys) reveal costs the timers can't see. Recurring themes + Step-1 numbers = the finding list.

Step 3: Audit the Inner Loop

The highest-frequency loop gets the deepest look: Is the dev environment reproducible in one command (or is setup a wiki page of drift-prone steps)? Can you run one test in seconds without the world? Does hot-reload actually work? Is the IDE experience functional (types, go-to-def, lint-on-save)? Are common tasks (reset DB, seed data, run service X) scripted or tribal knowledge? Every manual step here multiplies by invocations-per-day.

Step 4: Audit the Outer Loop

• CI: queue time vs run time (capacity vs speed problems differ), cache hit rates, test parallelization/sharding, whether PRs run only affected targets — delegate pipeline redesign to cicd-pipeline.
• Flakes: quarantine policy (a flaky test in the merge gate is a tax on everyone), ownership for fixing, test-suite-design for structural causes.
• Review latency: are PRs waiting on people or on process (required approvals, codeowner bottlenecks)?
• Docs: can an engineer answer "how do I X here?" without interrupting a senior — README freshness, runbooks, project-documentation.

Step 5: Prioritize by Tax, Not by Annoyance

Score each finding as time-cost × frequency × people affected (daily 10-second cuts beat monthly 10-minute ones), weighted by behavior distortion (anything that makes engineers skip verification is top-tier regardless of seconds). Produce the remediation list: quick wins first (cache config, test sharding, a make dev script) to build credibility, structural items (environment overhaul, CI capacity) as scheduled work with owners.

Step 6: Prove It and Keep It

Re-measure the Step-1 numbers after the fixes — DX work is uniquely easy to verify, so verify it. Then keep the loop honest: track 2–3 DX metrics continuously (CI p50/p95, flake rate, onboarding time), set a budget ("CI > 10 min is a defect"), and re-run the friction survey a couple of times a year. DX decays by default — every new service adds setup steps and CI minutes unless something pushes back.

Principles Applied

• Frequency beats magnitude: optimize the loop that runs 50×/day before the one that runs weekly.
• Avoidance is the loudest signal: what engineers won't do reveals more than what they complain about.
• Measured before and after: a DX improvement that can't show the numbers moved is an opinion.

Cross-Skill References

• technical-debt-review — the code-health complement to this workflow audit
• cicd-pipeline — redesigning the pipeline the audit flagged
• test-suite-design — structural fixes for slow or flaky suites
• project-documentation — the docs/onboarding gaps surfaced in Step 4
• metrics-and-okrs — DORA metrics and making DX goals measurable
• retrospective — mining recurring friction from team retros