Developer experience: What is it and why should you care?

What do building software and vacuuming your house have in common?

Jonathan Carter, technical advisor of the CEO at GitHub, used to hate vacuuming. That’s because his vacuum was located on the first floor of his home and bringing it upstairs to the main floor was tedious. But when he realized he could simply keep the vacuum where he needed it, the task wasn’t that hard. Now he vacuums every other day.

“The same is true with building software,” he says. “When we construct the experience to empower the desired behavior naturally and effortlessly, we get a great outcome.”

This is what developer experience (DevEx) is about. DevEx—sometimes called DevX or DX—examines how the juxtaposition of developers, processes, and tools positively or negatively affects software development. In this article, we’ll explore the key components of DevEx and how its optimization is integral for business success.

Let’s jump in.

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Learn about DevEx in our What is DevEx? video.

What is developer experience?

DevEx refers to the systems, technology, process, and culture that influence the effectiveness of software development. It looks at all components of a developer’s ecosystem—from environment to workflows to tools—and asks how they are contributing to developer productivity, satisfaction, and operational impact.

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

With DevEx, every aspect of a developer’s journey is questioned.

“Is the tool making my job harder or easier?” Gazit asks. “Is the environment helping me focus? Is the process eliminating ways in which I can make mistakes? Is the system keeping me in my flow—and confidently enabling me to stack my cards ever higher?”

Additionally, how developers subjectively feel makes all the difference—which can be gauged by user testing, surveys, and feedback.

“DevEx puts developers at the center and works to understand how they feel and think about the work that they do,” says Eirini Kalliamvakou, staff researcher at GitHub. Developer sentiment can uncover points of friction and provide the opportunity to find appropriate fixes.

“You can’t improve the developer experience with developers out of the loop,” she says.

Importantly, collaboration is the multiplier across the entire DevEx. Developers need to be able to easily communicate and share with each other to do their best work.

What is the history of developer experience?

While DevEx might seem like a logical strategy to improve software development, the industry has been slow to apply it.

Over the past few decades, developers have witnessed an explosion of technologies, open source libraries, package managers, languages, and services—with more tools, APIs, and integrations arriving by the day. The result is an ecosystem where nearly everything developers could want or need is at their fingertips.

But as the analyst firm RedMonk notes, while developers have access to an exponential amount of technology and DevOps tooling—which has produced a large degree of innovation and competition—they’re on their own figuring out how it all works together. This has led to a fragmented DevEx. It also puts pressure on developers to constantly learn about the latest products (or even just how to connect to the newest API).

“We need a holistic view of what makes up developers’ workflow,” GitHub’s Kalliamvakou says. “And once we have that, we need to make sure that the experience is collaborative and smooth every step of the way.”

Why is developer experience important?

In short, a good DevEx is important because it enables developers to build with more confidence, drive greater impact, and feel satisfied.

Greg Mondello, director of product at GitHub, says it’s no surprise that DevEx has seen a significant increase in investment over the past five years.

“In most contexts, software development capacity is the limiting factor for innovation,” he says. “Therefore, improvements to the effectiveness of software development are inherently valuable.”

Moreover, development is only becoming more complex. Building software today involves many tools, technologies, and services across different providers, which requires developers to manage far more intricate environments.

At its best, a well-conceived DevEx provides greater consistency across environments, processes, and workflows, while automating the more tedious and manual processes.

“This enables companies with better DevEx to outperform their competitors, regardless of vertical,” Mondello says.

The research backs this up.

According to a report from McKinsey, a better DevEx can lead to extensive benefits for organizations, such as improved employee attraction and retention, enhanced security, and increased developer productivity. As such, DevEx is important for all companies—and not just tech.

“It doesn’t matter what industry you’re part of or what geography you’re in,” Mondello says. “With better DevEx, you’ll have better business results.”

And the importance of DevEx will only continue to grow.

According to a Forrester opportunity snapshot, teams can reduce time to market and grow revenue by creating an easier way for developers to write code, build software, and ship updates to customers. As a result of improving DevEx:

• 74% of survey respondents said they can drive developer productivity
• 77% can shorten time to market
• 85% can impact revenue growth
• 75% can better attract and retain customers
• 82% can increase customer satisfaction

“I find it fascinating how anxious people get sitting at a stoplight,” GitHub’s Carter says. “They’re not there for very long. Yes, it’s a psychological thing that humans don’t like to wait.”

The same goes for building software.

“Great DevEx shortens the distance between intention and reality,” he says.

What makes a good developer experience?

A good DevEx is where developers “have the info they need and can pivot between focus and collaboration,” Kalliamvakou says. “They can complete tasks with minimal delay.”

Low friction is important.

“Or ideally, no friction at all,” she notes.

Developers experience many types of friction during their end-to-end workflow, especially if they’re using multiple tools. From meetings to requests to many other types of disruptions, developers often have to piece together context from fragmented, out-of-date sources, which hinders their ability to be productive and write high-quality code.

In the end, collaboration is king.

“Without collaboration, a good DevEx isn’t possible,” Kalliamvakou says.

What are key developer experience metrics?

Unfortunately, there are currently no standardized industry metrics to measure DevEx. However, Mondello says the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) framework, which measures an organization’s DevOps performance, can be helpful. Key metrics include:

• Deployment frequency (DF): how frequently an organization releases new software
• Lead time for changes (LT): the time taken from when a change is requested or initiated to when it is deployed
• Mean time to recovery (MTTR): the average time it takes to recover from a failure
• Change failure rate (CFR): the percentage of changes that result in a failure

However, Carter thinks good metrics go beyond DORA. For instance, he believes a great DevEx metric is the time to first contribution for a new hire. A good time signifies that the new developer got all the context they needed plus feels empowered from creating value, which is what DevEx is all about.

“No amount of morale boosting or being friendly makes up for the fact that people want to feel valuable,” Carter says. “Happier developers is the goal. There’s nobody in the world who feels great about opening a pull request that sits in an approval queue for two days.”

Likewise, Carter says customer response time is a good metric. A strong response time indicates that the team has what they need to move quickly, while feeling empowered and helpful.

“The more we can treat developer happiness as a goal, and measure thoughtful signals to make sure we’re doing that, the better,” he says. “This requires addressing culture, tooling, and policies to make sure teams have clarity and autonomy.”

Kalliamvakou notes that measuring DevEx underscores the need to continually check in with developers and see how they’re feeling. While organizations already know how to capture system performance data to gauge how efficient processes are, most don’t collect developers’ opinions on the systems they’re using.

“How can we improve developers’ experiences without checking in with developers about what their experience is?” she asks.

Kalliamvakou says that running periodic surveys is critical. These surveys need to capture developers’ satisfaction—or dissatisfaction—with systems and what it’s like to work with them daily. “Without these surveys, even the most sophisticated telemetry is incomplete and potentially misleading,” she says.

Kalliamvakou also warns that this work is not optional. “Organizations that are not surveying their developers on productivity, ease of work, etc. will fall behind,” she says.

What are ways to improve developer experience?

Companies and development teams should improve their DevEx the same way they improve other product spaces—by using a strategy that includes research, discovery, user testing, and other key design components.

“Here at GitHub, we are constantly striving to reduce the time it takes for our developers to execute their workflows,” Mondello says, mentioning how GitHub’s invention of the pull request was a pivotal moment in DevEx history. “This means finding ways to make the build process more efficient, optimizing deployment, and tuning tests to execute more effectively.”

He also adds that GitHub plays a leading role in the DevEx space: GitHub is a collaboration company, first and foremost, and collaboration is essential to DevEx. Especially in the age of AI. As time goes on, collaboration will become increasingly important, since it’s the only way to ensure that AI-generated code is solid.

“If you improve your collaboration, you’ll inevitably improve your DevEx,” Mondello says.

Kalliamvakou also notes that organizations need to understand their current DevEx and the most critical friction points.

“Is the documentation scattered and do developers have to spend precious energy to understand context?” she asks. “Do the build systems take a long time? Or are they flaky, leaving your developers frustrated by the delays and inconsistent behavior? Worst of all, are your developers unable to focus?”

Once an organization has done the work to identify friction, it needs to simplify, accelerate, or optimize existing systems and processes.

“Careful though!” Kalliamvakou says. “Any change will involve tradeoffs, so companies need to monitor if DevEx is actually improving or if friction is actually introduced by an intervention.”

Cutting down on the number of meetings, for instance, can seem like a great idea for leveling interruptions. But if developers start reporting that their collaboration is poor, you may end up in a worse place than when you started.

“It’s a lot of work to approach DevEx holistically and effectively,” Kalliamvakou says. This is why many organizations create DevEx teams that are dedicated to understanding, improving, and monitoring it.

What role does generative AI play in developer experience?

There is no doubt that generative AI is the future of DevEx, as it enables developers to write high-quality code faster.

“As models get better and more functionality is built around how developers work, we can expect AI to suggest whole workflows,” Kalliamvakou says, in addition to the code and pull request suggestions that they already provide. “AI could remove major disruptions, delays, and cognitive load that developers previously had to endure.”

Mondello agrees.

“Generative AI will unlock the potential for developers to leapfrog large amounts of the software development process,” he says. “Instead of merely focusing on eliminating toil or friction, DevEx will focus on finding ways to enable developers to make large strides in their development workflows.”

However, with the enablement of faster code, companies will also need to determine ways to speed up their build and test processes and improve their overall pipelines to production.

Mondello points to the impact that’s being made by GitHub’s generative AI product, GitHub Copilot.

“We will build upon our success with GitHub Copilot as we shape GitHub Copilot X and bring generative AI to the entire software development lifecycle,” he says.

The bottom line

In today’s engineering environments, DevEx is one of the most important aspects to innovating quickly and achieving business goals. Developer happiness and empowerment are critical for software success, regardless of industry or niche—and will only continue to become more important over time.

Written by

Gwen Davis

@purpledragon85