Focusing on delivering Chrome DevTools

[Yang Guo]

Dear users and contributors of Chrome DevTools,

Development on Chrome DevTools is more active than ever. In the past year, we have grown the team at Google significantly. Many exciting new features have made their debut, and we have fixed hundreds of issues that you have filed. This is a testament to Chrome's continued investment in DevTools, an indispensable part of modern web development.

To speed up our ability to deliver on our product vision, we have been busy modernising our code base. Adopting modern best practices has helped us implement ideas more quickly and with fewer bugs.

We also want to improve the efficiency of our design process. We prefer an opinionated approach to user experience design with course corrections based on user feedback, on top of a consistent and sustainable architecture, to allow us to create a unified product vision. To this end, we are changing the Chrome DevTools development process to mirror other parts of Chrome's product UI surface. Accordingly, ownership of the DevTools frontend code will be limited to members of the core Chrome DevTools team.

We remain committed to developing Chrome DevTools in open source, and continue to draw inspiration from the many ways folks use DevTools outside of Chrome. We welcome any contribution that makes DevTools better.

Best,

The Chrome DevTools team

[PhistucK]

Can you outline the difference between the previous state and the new state?

What does it mean? That only Googlers can be owners?

Are there other consequences?

☆PhistucK

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[Yang Guo]

The concrete changes are in this CL. We are streamlining the design guidelines to shorten the turnaround from design proposal to implementation. As we consider Chrome DevTools part of the Chrome experience, we require any change that we ship with Chrome DevTools to be approved by the Chrome DevTools team. Consequently, we are removing owners that are not part of the Chrome DevTools team to codify this requirement.

Cheers,

Yang

[PhistucK]

A simple "yes" would be more upfront. :P

So only Googlers can be owners.

I was wondering, are the user experience and visuals (of the Developer Tools, not of the rest of Chrome) designed by a usability expert and a designer, or are they mostly-developer-decided?

☆PhistucK

[Yang Guo]

Sure, it wasn't clear to me that this is what you were looking for: yes.

We do have a user experience designer to guide the visual design of Chrome DevTools. This is currently mostly the case for new features, and we have not yet had time to revisit older design decisions. Traditionally, software engineers on the team have some influence themselves on feature design. Going forward, we want to lean more heavily on UX professionals though.

Cheers,

Yang

[PhistucK]

Sorry!

That matches my experience. :)

Great, it sounds like the right way to go.

☆PhistucK