Developer Experience is more important than ever

The last 12 months have been turbulent for tech companies. And while higher profile issues like mass layoffs and fundraising have gotten lots of attention on the news and in social media, there’s a lot more to it.

Companies throughout the industry are looking for (and finding) ways to adapt, grow and thrive in the current climate. And many of us want to understand exactly how they are doing so.

I was happy to see that Humanitec commissioned one such study from Forrester Consulting. The study focused on more than 100 DevOps decision-makers to understand how platform engineering initiatives can help boost developer experience (DX) and productivity and their impacts on business metrics.

This study showed that today’s business climate is only making developer experience and developer satisfaction more critical to the overall performance and success of any company. Companies are recognizing this and reacting accordingly.

Before we get into the details though, here's some context: the reason this is so interesting to me and my team is that we're building tools that enable development teams to streamline their development workflows and significantly upgrade their developer experience.

Our latest open source offering is called "Preevy" - a CLI tool that easily creates shareable preview environments for complex applications. I would be thrilled and grateful if you could give us a star! And feel free to leave feedback in the comments ❤️
https://github.com/livecycle/preevy

Developer Experience is more important than ever

Here’s a summary of some of the study’s key findings that I found particularly interesting:

Increased focus on Developer productivity and developer satisfaction

When asked about their highest priorities in the next 12 months, developer productivity (87%) and developer satisfaction (83%) were the top two items on the list.

in general, Companies are realizing that they must enable developers to build and deliver high-quality software more efficiently.

Better DX leads to faster cycle times

A specific metric that companies and development teams are optimizing for is cycle time speed. 85% of companies said their “near-term goal” is to speed up release cycle times to keep pace with increased customer and market demands.

This number can’t be achieved by just telling the developers to “work harder”. And the macro economic realities are preventing companies from significantly increasing their headcount. So the only way to achieve this is through offering developers better tooling, better developer experience and increased developer satisfaction and happiness.

DX has an impact on the overall organizational performance

The need to improve developer experience and developer satisfaction is not limited to a specific metric. Companies are recognizing the impact that DX can have on the overall organizational performance.

When asked “what impact are you experiencing on each business area as a result of improving developer experience”, companies responded as follows:

• 74% said it impacted their developer productivity.
• 77% said it led to faster time to market for new ideas and products.
• 85% said it positively impacted customer satisfaction metrics and customer experience scores.
• 82% said it resulted in revenue growth In other words, if life is good for your development teams. Life is probably good for your business.

How exactly are companies providing a better DX?

Participants were asked: “Which of the following steps, if any, has your organization taken to improve the developer experience”. Among the more specific, technical responses is something that is relevant to virtually any development team:

41% said that their companies are investing in collaboration tools to boost developer productivity

And when companies were asked: “How do you plan to improve developer experience over the next 24 months?” 51% replied that they plan to invest in new technologies to help employees with their day-to-day job functions.

Conclusion

It’s clear that developer experience and developer satisfaction are more in focus than ever before. Companies and development teams are realizing that they key to their success lies in their ability to get more out of the team through improved tooling, better collaboration and increased developer satisfaction levels.