Enterprises can avoid burned out developer teams by integrating automation into daily workflows and involving developers with decision-making processes, according to Snyk Head of Developer Relations Randall Degges.

"It is essential to give developers a voice in the applications they build," Degges told SDxCentral. Developers are often handed a long list of projects their organization needs completed while they're omitted from decisions about project priorities. But "the best way for organizations to retain talent and prevent burnout is by looping developers into these processes and granting them autonomy in the applications they build."

But it goes further than development priorities, he argued. Enterprise leadership should fold developers into the company's broader goals, plans, and priorities from the start. "To build a culture that attracts and retains top developer talent, you must invest in your developers," he said. "If you hire great people but don’t give them a seat at the table, their talent may potentially go to waste."

Automation is another key piece of avoiding developer burnout and empowering those teams to "focus on what they do best," Degges added. To free up time for developer innovation, he recommends automating manual tasks and determining which tools best support developer productivity. For example, "some of our developer teams at Snyk use internal metrics to evaluate the time saved per month via automation," he explained.

Perhaps the most significant area of organizational involvement for developers is security. Dev teams are responsible for designing and building systems that protect sensitive information and resources, and they have the technical knowledge to understand "potential vulnerabilities and risks associated with different design and implementation choices," Degges said. Involving developers in security decisions helps shift security left, with protective measures integrated from the beginning rather than as an afterthought.

This strategy also supports a healthy working relationship between security and engineering teams. "Security is everyone’s responsibility, and it’s unfair to both groups to shoulder the weight alone," Degges said. The increased adoption of cloud-native applications and architectures has accelerated development time and outputs, but it has also accelerated challenges like an expanding attack surface and blurred delineations of security responsibilities.

Most cloud security mishaps stem from "ineffective cross-team collaboration," he added, citing data from Snyk's "State of Cloud Security Report." Teams using varying tools or policy frameworks, for example, lead to inconsistent enforcement and work efforts. Collaboration, he stressed, is needed between developer and security teams to "move organizations closer to digital transformation by addressing security challenges in real-time."