How R&R’s devs are building an IDP on their terms

tl;dr Workforce management SaaS provider R&R deployed Backstage and Spotify’s Soundcheck plugin to help them make sense of their sprawling microservices and ensure quality across their tech ecosystem. By inviting their developers to share their expertise and define their own tech standards, R&R has boosted motivation, engagement, and efficiency across the business.

About R&R WFM

Building smarter workplaces

R&R helps retail and food organizations to “Plan People Smarter”. Our software and services for workforce management enable our customers to plan staffing, forecast customer numbers, anticipate product demands, optimize logistics, and more.

Since the company was founded in 2006, we’ve grown to become the market leader for workforce management in the Netherlands while expanding operations into Germany and Belgium.

I started at R&R in 2011, originally as an external consultant for the business. In 2020, I joined as a permanent solutions architect, and one of the first things we initiated was building up our platform engineering team.

Making sense of our microservices

One of the big issues we wanted to resolve was duplicated efforts — we were doing a lot of the same stuff over and over again. This was particularly apparent for authentication and authorization.

Almost all of our customers needed a solution, but when every developer is coming up with a separate fix for every customer, that’s a concern. It’s inefficient, and we wanted to ensure we weren’t having to reinvent the wheel every time.

This proliferation, fragmentation, and duplication across our authorization solutions was also a symptom of a broader challenge: the complexity of our microservices architecture. We were able to add new functionality and features, but at the same time, organizational silos were forming — everyone was building their own little thing, and we didn’t have a single set of best practices to follow.

Only adding to the complexity was our source code, some of which dates back almost 30 years and had no clear owner. In other words, our whole tech ecosystem was simply in our heads. And it was growing rapidly.

We realized we needed an internal development platform (IDP) that included a Software Catalog that would help us centralize services and ownership, promote discoverability, and empower developers to reuse, share, and learn from what one another had built.

Discovering Backstage

We first saw Backstage in the Thoughtworks Technology Radar where it received the “Adopt” recommendation. I thought: “OK, now this looks interesting.” Fast forward a few months and I was building the proof of concept in TypeScript on my own machine and showing a few people around the company how we could use Backstage to manage our software catalog.

It was clear, though, that a change like this doesn’t come without challenges. On the technical side, getting the catalog data was a bigger hurdle than expected. Our repositories in Azure, for example, only provided source code. They didn’t tell the whole story. We needed to be able to answer: What is this thing? Is it healthy? How does it work? Who owns it?

There was also a cultural shift to manage. When we introduced the idea of Backstage to R&R, some people were skeptical at the start. Devs are particular about their choice of languages, tools, platforms — even their coffee should be done a certain way. And so our devs were wary about adding something else to their tech stack. We got a lot of "Yet another tool?"

Ready, set, R&R’s Roadies!

We formed an internal group called R&R’s “Backstage Roadies” to champion the platform and drive internal adoption. It began with a representative from each of the company’s six teams, each of which received their own “Backstage Passes”.

^{R&R issued a Backstage Pass to each of their Backstage Roadies}

Our R&R Roadies weren’t just promoting the tool — they were tasked with making it genuinely useful for our end users. The Roadies met regularly to share feedback and problem solve, finding new ways to populate the catalog that would add value for every team across the business.

As just one example, the Roadies helped solve a discussion about how we define components, systems, and domains. This question kept cropping up, so we used Backstage’s recommended System Model to provide clear naming conventions and added that to our TechDocs.

Setting new standards with Soundcheck

With adoption growing, we started using the Soundcheck Plugin for Backstage, to further improve our tech health, supported by expert focus groups.

Before implementing Soundcheck, we had little visibility over whether the growing number of microservices being deployed met best practices. We’d need to manually search the code to check.

^{R&R’s Focus Groups defined best practices to create tech health goals in Soundcheck}

Soundcheck helps us save significant time while taking our rigor up a notch. It provides codified best practices to improve reliability, security, quality, and alignment across the ecosystem. It also allows us to automate some of those checks and visualizes them, providing clear feedback so that we know we’re always building and working with high-quality code. It’s been a huge step up for us compared with having to manually search our code in Azure DevOps.

As with our R&R Roadies guiding our broader implementation of Backstage, we knew that for Soundcheck to really make an impact, we needed internal experts in the driving seat. That’s why we’ve formed several Focus Groups made up of specialists who own different domains in Soundcheck. We’ll continue to refine these but here are the three we started out with:

One source of truth, owned by everyone

Backstage and Soundcheck have already helped our team manage our fast-growing catalog of microservices and add a fresh level of ownership, organization, and rigor to our existing codebase. Looking ahead, we’ll keep adding to its capabilities — recently, we’ve been demoing embedding an AI chatbot into Backstage so that we can ask it specific questions about our catalog.

Alongside improving our standards, Backstage and Soundcheck have also helped us to be better teammates. By putting our implementation into the hands of internal experts, we’re giving everyone more autonomy. Our teams are able to make their best practices and principles visible and actionable to everyone.

It’s all been about giving our end users a real stake in the success of our IDP, recognizing and tackling skepticism, and sowing the seeds for organic adoption through internal champions. Our success has hinged on not dictating from above, but making every developer’s voice heard and giving them the tools they need to make their vision a reality.

Three lessons for a successful bottom-up deployment of Soundcheck

1. Let your devs’ voices be heard. It will boost adoption, motivation, and engagement with the new platform and standards.
2. Your internal experts know best. Set up specialist groups and empower them to define your standards.
3. Identify platform champions. Amplify their successes and use those wins to tackle skepticism head-on.

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Jonathan Mezach is a solutions architect at R&R. He has almost two decades of experience in development and is currently focused on providing the best possible experience for his teams, ensuring they have the tools and platforms needed to deliver value to their customers. In his free time, Jonathan volunteers as a presenter and studio technician for SymfoCity — a radio show dedicated to symphonic and progressive rock music.

The Soundcheck plugin comes with Spotify Portal for Backstage or as part of the Spotify Plugins for Backstage bundle subscription.