Engineering a Developer Portal: A Case Study

In this thesis, we explore the implementation of Backstage, an open-source developer portal developed by Spotify, to aid developers in their daily tasks. We collaborated with Bending Spoons, an Italian software house based in Milan, to create a comprehensive portal consolidating resources and information for efficient development processes. With many independent teams at Bending Spoons, a Developer Portal is necessary to reduce context switching and allow engineers to concentrate on their core tasks. In today’s world, the software is accompanied by various pieces of information, such as documentation, design documents, monitoring dashboards, cost insights, and issue tracking, to name a few. This document will delve into the various aspects that can genuinely benefit developers and enhance their productivity. After researching the appropriate Backstage setup and considering how other companies use it, we will showcase the implementation and design details focusing on incremental improvements to create a scalable and maintainable system while reducing the need for manual configuration and enhancing the user experience. The implementation will consider the whole development process, the project setup, the actual implementation, the infrastructure design used for the deployment, and an overview of the tooling and platform used. The end goal is to have a system easy to use that can provide meaningful resources to Bending Spoons’s developers and at the same time be easy to use and maintain. To make sure we achieve this goal, after the first release, we will perform a round of user interviews and elaborate on the results to understand points of improvement.