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| Backstage Insights | flipside |
Backstage Insights
This document briefly summarizes the research, branded "Backstage Insight," done at Spotify in 2022 to identify ways to drive adoption of Backstage.
Why Backstage Adoption is Hard
Backstage is a complex system that must be adopted universally throughout an organization in order to reap its full benefits.
Definition of "Adoption"
Adoption here means:
- An organization-wide instance ("app") of Backstage must be installed, run, maintained, and actively updated with new capabilities via plugins;
- All development groups in the organization must use Backstage to, at the
least, catalog their projects. Additional benefits accrue if groups also:
- Manage documentation in Backstage;
- Use templates in Backstage to create new software artifacts; and
- Automate development using Backstage, including integrating Backstage with other development support systems.
- Backstage must be recognized throughout the organization as the "source of truth" about all software development within the organization.
Barriers to Adoption
Backstage Insights identifies three types of barriers to adoption: technical, cultural, and combination.
Technical barriers are the effort required for groups to adopt Backstage for software projects, including writing or adapting plugins for features unique to a particular project or group.
Backstage is a very flexible product with vast potential to adapt to variations in organizational infrastructure and workflows. The flipside is that Backstage is complex, and almost always requires significant investment of talent and resources to implement fully.
Cultural barriers are institutional resistance to adopting Backstage due to:
- Unwillingness to devote resources to adopting and maintaining Backstage;
- Skepticism of the value of Backstage;
- General resistance to change, which is always present in an organization.
Cultural barriers are typically more difficult to overcome than technical ones.
Technical and Cultural were described as barriers that exhibit a combination of technical and cultural elements.
The Backstage Adoption Model
Backstage Insights looked for commonalities in the adoption path of a number of surveyed organizations. The following five-step model was found to be commonly, if not universally, descriptive of the adoption path of the organizations surveyed.
- Problem identification, definition, and alignment: Identify the problem or problems that require a software solution like Backstage. Recruit the people necessary to pursue a solution.
- Finding the right solution: The identified participants frame the problem and search for solutions. In some cases Backstage had already been identified as a likely or potential solution.
- Demo proof of concept: Set up a limited demo to determine that: Backstage can solve the problem(s); Backstage fits with the organization's infrastructure; resources are available, with the right skill sets, to implement Backstage; Backstage provides value.
- Full proof of concept: Build out functionality and get feedback from users. Gather more rigorous metrics regarding perceived value. This stage is characterized by some hard-to-reverse implementation decisions, so due diligence is advised.
- Driving full adoption: This stage involves committing resources to full adoption. In some cases, expensive mistakes might need to be corrected, despite due diligence in step 4. Resources need to be devoted to shifting the culture to one that values and relies on Backstage.
The Problem To Be Solved: A Note on Desired Outcomes
Outcomes are organizational results of adopting Backstage. Desired outcomes are ones that alleviate the problems identified in (1), above.
Backstage Insights surveyed both internal (Spotify) Backstage adopters and external organizations to determine the outcomes adopters hoped to achieve. The number one outcome for both internal and external users was to maintain clear ownership of software.
For external adopters, other top outcomes were consistent with improving the maturity level of their development practices, for example standardizing software development practices and increasing collaboration. For internal adopters, other top outcomes were goals that relied on already-mature development practices, for example improving monitoring and tracking costs. The authors hypothesized that this difference was a function of the maturity level of the Backstage implementation at the surveyed organization: already high (for Spotify, where Backstage has been used for years) or low and still developing (for other organizations).
Necessity of a Champion
The authors of Backstage Insights were clear that implementing Backstage in an organization requires a champion. This champion is dedicated at least part time to evangelizing, implementing, and driving adoption of Backstage throughout the organization.
Champions varied in their job titles, skill sets, and "everyday" roles. However, some characteristics were common to all Backstage champions:
- Champions were dedicated to changing the status quo to make the professional lives of developers better throughout the organization.
- Champions believed that Backstage was the right platform for positive change.
- Champions were typically leaders (managers or technical leads) before taking on the champion role.
- Champions used a wide variety of technical, leadership, and interpersonal skills to drive the adoption of Backstage.
Champion Job Titles
This is a list of job titles held by Backstage champions in surveyed organizations:
- DevEx Engineering Manager (2)
- Staff Engineer
- Software Architect
- QA Manager
- Technical PM
- IT Engineering Manager
- Engineering Manager
- Site Reliability Engineer