Tools 53. Container Structure Tests Trial Container Structure Tests (CST) is a tool developed by Google to test the structure of a container image. CST can be used to check the existence or absence of a certain file in the image’s file system, to verify the content of a file, to check the output or errors inside a specific command issued in the container and to check the metadata of the container image (i.e., labels, entrypoint and command) which helps ensure compliance with the CIS Docker Benchmark. We’ve had good experiences with CST and recommend you give it a try. In addition to preventing vulnerabilities — checking whether the container is exposing unnecessary ports — we also used it to validate that each Docker container passes all requirements necessary for it to be deployed and to run an application in the enterprise’s platform. One of these requirements was having an observability agent installed in the image. It’s important to be aware that CST isn’t officially supported by Google, which could impact maintenance. 54. Devbox Trial Devbox is a terminal-based tool that provides an approachable interface for creating reproducible, per-project development environments, leveraging the Nix package manager without using virtual machines or containers. Our teams use it to eliminate version and configuration mismatches of CLI tools and custom scripts in their per-project development environments, on top of the standardization that per-language package managers provide. They found that it notably streamlines their onboarding workflow because once it has been configured for a codebase, it takes one CLI command (devbox shell) to stand it up in a new machine. Devbox supports shell hooks, custom scripts and devcontainer.json generation for integration with VSCode. 55. DX DevEx 360 Trial DX DevEx 360 is a survey-based tool that helps find leading signals of developer productivity by focusing on frictions that developers face in their day-to-day work, such as the code review process, code quality, ability to do deep work and more. The survey is designed by Nicole Forsgren and Margaret-Anne Storey, who have led previous efforts like DORA and SPACE, among other experts. Our platform engineering teams have used DX DevEx 360 successfully to understand developer sentiment and identify friction points to inform the platform roadmap. Unlike similar tools, with DX DevEx 360 we’ve received a response rate of 90% or above, often with detailed comments from developers on problems and ideas for improvements. We also appreciate that the tool makes results transparent to engineers in the company instead of just managers and that it enables team-by-team breakdown to enable continuous improvement for each team’s context. 56. GitHub Copilot Trial GitHub Copilot is used by many of our teams to help them write code faster. Overall, most of our developers find it very useful and would be cross if we took it away from them. We’ve been collating and sharing many of our experiences with Copilot through a series on Generative AI and a guide on getting started with Copilot. Note that GitHub Copilot can be used with any codebase, not just codebases hosted on GitHub. © Thoughtworks, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 30