[quest] Of the organizations using Backstage in production, what were the goals / intent for the Backstage system?

[cnygardtw]

One organization's experience:

Intent - remove impediments from reuse of previously-developed capability. Evidence pointed to lack of awareness of existing capability.

• Q: Was it central group that addressed the issue? Or federated across groups?
• Motivated by central group, implemented across groups to gain interest / adoption
• "owning the problem is not the same as owning the solution"
• collective ownership of the problem, creating a community around the solution is helpful

Learnings:

• nothing is as simple as it appears
• understand the root problems in detail (lack of reuse incl. fear of dependency, NIH, etc)
• tooling is not a complete solution, requires other efforts to drive cultural change
• great tooling like Backstage helps (actually a necessary pre-condition to enable change)

Followup question in use-cases:

• Does scaffolding help in jump-starting development?
• Has anyone integrated CI/CD pipelines?
• Some features (based on Spotify's open culture) don't translate well to regulated environment.