Understanding Developer Experience (DevEx) and Why It Matters

DevEx, or developer experience, isn’t just another industry fad.

A study by Forrester found that 74% of professionals believe improving developer experience (DevEx) drives productivity.

Developer experience refers to developers' overall experience interacting with tools, processes, and environments used to build software.

But what exactly is DevEx, and why does it matter?

Let’s jump right in to understand this better.

What is developer experience (DevEx)?

Developer experience encompasses everything from development environments and toolchains to company culture and work processes that influence a developer's daily activities.

Greg Mondello, director of product at GitHub, states: "Software development capacity is often the limiting factor for innovation. Improvements to software development effectiveness are inherently valuable."

DevEx aims to create an environment where developers can:

Work efficiently
Stay focused
Produce high-quality code with minimal friction

Key components of Developer Experience include:

Systems and technology
Processes and workflows
Culture and work environment

Idan Gazit, senior director of research at GitHub, offers an insightful analogy: "Building software is like having a giant house of cards in our brains. Tiny distractions can knock it over in an instant. DevEx is about how we contend with that house of cards."

This analogy captures the delicate balance developers must maintain while working on complex projects. A positive DevEx helps developers maintain that balance, allowing them to stay in their flow state and work more effectively.

Why does developer experience matter?

Let’s explore some of the key reasons why it makes sense to start implementing some form of DevEx in your business.

Increased productivity and efficiency

Well-designed developer experience significantly boosts productivity and efficiency. When developers have access to the right tools, streamlined processes, and a supportive work environment, they can focus on writing code and solving problems rather than wrestling with infrastructure issues or navigating complex workflows.

In the same Forrester Survey, 82% of respondents believe improved DevEx can increase customer satisfaction over the long run. The correlation likely stems from the direct link between developer productivity and the ability to deliver high-quality software quickly.

Higher job satisfaction and reduced burnout

Developers enjoying a positive experience at work are more likely to be satisfied with their jobs and less prone to burnout. Good DevEx reduces frustrations, eliminates unnecessary roadblocks, and provides developers with a sense of autonomy and purpose in their work.

Over 63% of developers said that developer experience is very important when deciding whether to stay in the job or not.

The same report found that 86% of leaders believe attracting and retaining the best talent would require improving the developer experience first.

Improved code quality and innovation

Good user experience is a result of good development practices and systems. So, only focusing on the end result, without fixing what’s broken in-house can lead to a disaster.

That’s why you need to create an environment that supports your developers’ creativity and problem-solving skills so they can write higher-quality code and more innovative solutions—thus creating better software for the end users.

With DevEx prioritized, you give your developers a way to experiment, iterate quickly, and learn from mistakes without fear of repercussions.

Better collaboration and teamwork

Good DevEx doesn’t only help individual developers on the team.

When you work towards a better developer experience, you are also implementing better toolchains in the team, improving how people collaborate, and creating systems for ideas to flow.

This culture of innovation can encourage people to work together and collaborate on different projects.

Faster time to market

DevEx also helps shorten the time to market, according to 77% of surveyed developers.

This generally happens because good DevEx also means working towards eliminating bottlenecks and inefficiencies that can slow down the development process.

What is good DevEx?

Good developer experience requires thinking holistically about not just one or two aspects but addressing all aspects of a developer's work life.

Tools and technology

Most devex improvements start at the toolchains. Let’s look at what we need here:

Efficient development environments: You want to provide developers with fast IDEs and computers and any new tools that can help improve their development environments.
Integrated toolchains: You should aim to create a seamless integration between various development tools. This includes connecting version control systems, CI/CD pipelines, and code editors, allowing developers to work smoothly across different stages of the development process.
AI-powered code completion tools: Add advanced AI tools like GitHub Copilot to your development environment. These tools can suggest code snippets and help automate repetitive tasks, potentially boosting developer productivity.
Performance monitoring and debugging tools: Equip your team with user-friendly tools that make it simple to identify and resolve issues quickly.
Cloud-based development environments: Consider adopting platforms that help developers work from any location while maintaining consistent development spaces, promoting flexibility and standardization across your team.

You can implement Facets.cloud to automate infrastructure management and provisioning while allowing the Ops teams to create the guardrails required for developers to self-provision infrastructure without overusing resources.

Work environment and culture

Once you have settled the toolchains, we’ll move to the company culture and work environment—two important factors that help developers feel at ease while doing their job. Let’s look at a few elements that you can improve:

Clear communication channels: Set up effective communication tools and practices so developers can collaborate with team members and stakeholders, helping everyone be on the same page.
Collaborative atmosphere: Create an environment encouraging knowledge sharing, promote practices like pair programming, and create mentorship opportunities. The more knowledge spreads across the team, the faster the learning.
Continuous learning opportunities: Provide access to training resources and conferences and give developers time for self-improvement and to contribute to open-source projects or just hobby projects.
Psychological safety: Build a culture where developers feel safe taking risks and encourage sharing ideas and admitting mistakes without fear of negative consequences.
Work-life balance: Implement policies supporting flexible working hours and remote work options and respect personal time to prevent burnout and maintain long-term productivity.

Workflows

And finally, we need to put this all together and create a workflow that doesn’t block any team or individual from completing their assigned work as efficiently as possible. Here are a few things that you can start with:

Efficient onboarding: Design a well-structured onboarding process. New developers quickly get up to speed with the codebase, tools, and team practices, reducing time to productivity.
Agile development practices: Adopt agile methodologies promoting iterative development. Encourage frequent feedback and adaptability to change, helping teams respond quickly to new requirements or challenges.
Code review processes: Establish clear guidelines and tools for code reviews. Constructive feedback and knowledge sharing improve code quality and team skills.
Automated testing and quality assurance: Implement robust automated testing frameworks. Issues get caught early and the burden of manual testing reduces, improving overall code reliability.
Deployment automation: Set up streamlined CI/CD pipelines. Automated build, test, and deployment processes reduce manual errors and speed up release cycles.
Documentation and knowledge management: Maintain comprehensive, up-to-date documentation and knowledge bases. Developers can easily find information and solve problems independently, reducing bottlenecks.

Common challenges in improving the developer experience

The key elements that make up a positive developer experience seem easy on paper, but there are quite a few challenges that you need to address:

Fragmented toolchains: Developers often work with a wide array of tools that need to be integrated better, and changing them can lead to context switching and reduced productivity. Find ways to streamline your toolchain to reduce these pain points.
Developer environments: Setting up and maintaining consistent development environments challenges even seasoned pros. Developers might struggle to quickly create self-serve environments for testing code. And oftentimes difficulties in replicating production conditions locally can lead to the frustrating "it works on my machine" problem. Look for ways to standardize and automate your environment setup process.
Excessive context switching: Frequent interruptions or developers juggling multiple tasks simultaneously can disrupt a developer's flow state and decrease overall productivity. Try to help the team set up dedicated blocks of uninterrupted time for deep work and minimize unnecessary context shifts.
High ticket-ops: Frequent reliance on ops teams to create or modify development environments slows your developers down and creates bottlenecks. Instead, focusing on self-service options and automation in environment management can help increase autonomy and productivity across the team.
Inadequate documentation: Poor or outdated documentation forces developers to waste time searching for information or reinventing solutions to problems someone on your team may have already solved. Prioritize and incentivize the creation and maintenance of clear, up-to-date documentation to save future headaches.
Slow feedback loops: Long waits for code reviews, builds, or deployments kill momentum and cause frustration. These delays compound when you face obstacles in setting up or modifying your development environments. Try to find opportunities to automate and speed up your feedback cycles.
Technical debt and legacy systems: A lot of companies stick to legacy tech because it’s expensive to rebuild things. These outdated or poorly maintained codebases can be frustrating and time-consuming for new developers. If your team is working on such systems, try to move away from them one step at a time to avoid downtimes and the high upfront costs.
Lack of autonomy: Overly restrictive policies or micromanagement block creativity and also reduce job satisfaction since developers now feel caged inside a set of rules. Instead, try to create an open culture that gives everyone enough freedom to work without relying too much on other teams.
Insufficient resources: Limited access to necessary hardware, software licenses, or computing resources can hinder a developer's ability to work effectively. Of course, this comes down to the budgets assigned to each project—however, if lack of resources is the obstacle, try to advocate for the tools and resources needed for better execution.
Poor work-life balance: High-pressure environments with unrealistic deadlines or expectations of constant availability can lead to burnout. Take inspiration from larger tech companies that require developers to spend time on personal projects instead of spending every minute on the job—this helps the companies over the long term with happier developers and more creative solutions to old problems.

Best practices for enhancing developer experience

Now, you know what makes up good developer experience and what the challenges are. Let’s look at the best practices and things that you can do to improve the developer experience.

Automate what you can

Automation is probably the easiest way to start improving the developer experience. CI/CD pipelines automate build, test, and deployment processes, reducing manual work and speeding up development cycles.

You can implement scripts, bots, and AI-powered tools to handle routine tasks like code formatting, dependency updates, and basic code reviews.

Along with that, giving developers self-service infrastructure also helps them manage their own development environments and resources. If you want to implement self-service infrastructure in your organization, the easiest way would be to use a platform like Facets.cloud.

With Facets, your Ops team can create the guardrails and infrastructure provisioning limits, while developers can directly create new instances as and when required without waiting for tickets to be resolved.

You can also streamline the code review processes through well-chosen tools and practices, which can make code reviews more efficient and valuable for everyone involved.

Create continuous feedback loops

You also need to create some sort of real-time collaboration feature that enables code sharing and pair programming, boosting knowledge transfer.

To further make collaboration useful, gather regular developer feedback through surveys, retrospectives, and open channels.

The insights you’ll gain from here can help pinpoint areas for improvement—showing developers how their work impacts the bigger picture can increase motivation.

Improve support and documentation

DevEx isn’t only for the existing developers but also for the new ones.

To make onboarding them easier and faster, you want to have clear documentation for all codebases, APIs, and internal processes, which in turn forms the foundation of excellent support.

The knowledge management systems you use for storing the documentation can further be used with LLMs to become a single source of truth for all your developers.

A question to the LLM that knows answers from your knowledgebase can make it easier for not only onboarding new developers but even enhancing customer support.

To make this sustainable, you can even gamify knowledge sharing through points and scoreboards, giving your team members a reason to add to the documentation.

Optimize the development environment

The pandemic gave us a new way of working—a more flexible way we hadn’t thought of before. In fact, only 4% of developers want to go to the office 5 days a week.

So, DevEx isn’t restricted to just in-office teams. It extends to individual developers, no matter the locations.

Start with providing each member powerful hardware for an efficient development setup—ensuring that the hardware is never the bottleneck for productivity. This hardware becomes even more powerful when paired with the perfect set of collaboration tools.

If you haven’t already, implement containerization technologies for more efficiency and better resource usage.

Don’t let technical debt get out of hand

Technical debt is the sort of mess no developer wants to enter into. If your company forms a reputation for having a lot of backlogs or legacy technology, it discourages people from joining in.

Source: xkcd

Now, you can’t clear debt overnight. It will take time.

But the easiest way is to understand that it takes time and schedule time. Consider refactoring old code, finding ways to upgrade legacy technologies one by one, and any other changes that will ensure long-term viability of your code.

Also Read: 10 Best Software Release Management Tools to Streamline Your Deployment

Measuring and improving developer experience

Alright, so you have started implementing tools and technologies to enhance DevEx, are working on improving the company culture and also implementing the best practices.

How do you know that it’s all working? Let’s look at the key metrics that you can use to see if you’re headed in the right direction.

The quickest way is to look at the DORA metrics to track progress.

Deployment Frequency: Measures how often an organization successfully releases to production. Higher frequency often indicates better DevEx.
Lead Time for Changes: Tracks the time from code commit to code running in production. Shorter lead times suggest more efficient processes.
Time to Restore Service: Measures how long it takes to restore service after an incident. Quick recovery times reflect robust systems and practices.
Change Failure Rate: Represents the percentage of changes that lead to failures in production. Lower rates indicate higher quality and stability.

Then, combine these metrics with developer satisfaction surveys, provide a comprehensive view of your development environment's health.

You can also track additional DevEx-specific measurements such as:

Code review turnaround time: Faster reviews often lead to quicker iterations and higher developer satisfaction.
Build and test success rates: Higher success rates typically indicate better code quality and more stable development environments.
Time spent on different activities: Analyzing how developers allocate their time between coding, meetings, and debugging can help identify areas for efficiency improvements.
Onboarding time: Shorter onboarding times often indicate better documentation and support systems.

If you can, find a way to automate regular tracking of these metrics so you get a clear view of how things are improving within the team. Our goal isn't just to improve numbers, but to create an environment where developers can work more efficiently and enjoyably.

What does the future of developer experience look like?

Developer workflows are improving rapidly. What was relevant just one year ago seems like a decade old today.

For instance, the simple code completion tools we used earlier are now replaced with LLM-powered code completion tools. And these tools not only complete the line you were writing but also the rest of the function.

With AI in the picture now, things are moving at speeds we simply haven’t seen before.

And as technologists, our job is to stay on the lookout for any tech that can make the developer’s life easier. Things that can help them become self-reliant, require less external help that can bottleneck progress, and basically unblock them completely.

That said, if you want to unblock your CI/CD pipelines and automate infrastructure provisioning and much more, try Facets.cloud today!