A good developer experience can solve many tough problems that seem difficult to solve otherwise.
Translated from 7 Reasons Why Developer Experience is a Strategic Priority by No Nica Mellifera was a developer with 7 years of experience before moving into developer relations. She specializes in containerized workloads, serverless and public cloud engineering. No Nica has long been an advocate for open standards and has given lectures and workshops on the subject. When I first started working in software development, there were some "red flags" that meant I didn't want to be part of a team. Once I knew that the team culture was good and the environment felt familiar, I had two big questions:
How often do you publish**?
How long does it take to publish once?
Some of the answers really blew my mind. The coolest project I've been asked to join admits that they haven't released a new release to production in 18 months, and they know it's at least another 6 months before they release their current release candidate. Before you ask, no, they're not doing a rover!
Some of my friends were confused when I explained to my friends that they had abandoned this dream project since they never went online:"nica, if the pay is good and the tools are interesting, what does it matter how often you post it, daily or once a year?"The answer relates to a fundamental truth of software engineering: the experience of writing, testing, and deploying** has a huge impact on an engineer's well-being.
When I first started working as a programmer, each office had a beer keg and a ping-pong table, and most also had pinball machines. Spending a few thousand dollars to keep developers happy is definitely worth the money for the company. Our industry is realizing that the experience of developers doing their own work is more important than any fancy drink or office toy.
That's why developer experience is a core value for market-leading engineering teams, especially for back-end engineers working in cloud-native, microservices environments. Often, the areas that would benefit most from a good developer experience are also the things that engineering leaders care about the most but feel overwhelming. No one wants to miss a deadline to deliver functionality at half the expected speed, but software development is always a complex field, and we can only make it successful by empowering our engineers. Developer experience (DevEx) refers to the overall environment, tools, practices, and culture that software developers encounter in their day-to-day work. It encompasses everything from the ease of setting up the development environment, to the efficiency of workflows, to the effectiveness of tools and processes, and the overall work culture that supports their creative and technical endeavors.
When people imagine a great developer experience, they are imagining intuitive tools and practices that allow developers to focus on programming and problem-solving rather than being dragged down by procedural inefficiencies or technical hurdles. Essentially, DevEx is about providing a supportive framework that empowers developers to do their best work, innovate, and meaningfully contribute to their projects and the broader goals of the organization.
A good DevEx can help you retain developers for longer and find that they are more committed to the task. It helps your developers understand and care more about the business problems you're facing than the technical hurdles you're overcoming. Retrospectives and demos will include more "we've accelerated the interface for 80% of end users" and less "this week we finally figured out how to connect AWS Lambda with NAT Gateway". Having just the right tools at the right time can make a well-run store a truly enjoyable environment to work and collaborate in. There are a few compelling reasons why it's important to focus on DevEx:
Increased productivity is probably the most direct impact of improving DevEx. Developers can work more effectively when they have the right tools, processes, and environments. This results in faster development cycles, faster turnaround times for feature releases, and more agile maintenance and bug fixes.
Developers who have the best tools and practices and work in a supportive environment are more likely to experiment and innovate.
At Uber, the fluidity of the developer deployment experience, which allows developers to safely test services against production, is part of the tools that enable product teams to roll out new AI-matching and path-finding strategies in weeks instead of months. Developers can test at almost the speed at which they can submit pull requests, and the result is a new experience for users that far exceeds the competition. Better output quality and innovation can lead to better product quality, and there may be groundbreaking new features.
In the highly competitive tech industry, attracting and retaining skilled developers is a significant challenge. Exceptional Devex is a key factor for top talent to look for when looking for an employer. Companies that are known for providing excellent DevEx are more likely to attract and retain the best talent in the field.
Good DevEx can lead to more efficient use of resources, which can lead to reduced operational costs. This includes reduced time spent debugging and fixing issues due to better testing and development practices, as well as reduced costs associated with developer churn.
Focusing on Devex shows that the company values its employees and their work environment. When DevEx gets it right, it creates advocates in your engineering team who support the adoption of new tools and practices. Romaric Philogene talks about how early adopters of developer platforms can build a strong team culture:
"These early adopters can provide valuable feedback, advocate for your platform within the company, and drive organic growth through their endorsement. ”This can lead to higher employee satisfaction and a stronger sense of belonging, which is critical for long-term success.
In a rapidly changing technology environment, the ability to adapt quickly is critical. Improving DevEx means development teams can respond more quickly to market changes, customer needs, and new trends.
When we ask the cause of software delays in modern software development, a common answer is "regressions, rollbacks, and other out-of-band failures." Essentially, when we deploy a ** that seems to be working, but we find it interrupted in production, the process of identifying the problem, documenting it, and having an engineer fix it is much slower than if you identified the problem earlier. The developer experience is critical to mitigating this risk. Better Devex often means better testing and quality assurance processes, which can help identify and mitigate risks early in the development cycle. This prevents costly failures or security breaches in the future.
Problems that can be solved by a good developer experience are often the ones that feel the hardest to solve any other way. No manager can claim that they always know the best way to attract and retain tech talent, or how they can ensure that features are never delayed. These problems feel difficult to solve because the reasons are not easy to quantify.
We all know that competitive salaries help retain top talent, but it's rarely money, hours worked, or anything that can be entered into electronics** for reasons that make engineers move around after a year. Rather, it's about the soft aspects of a developer's day-to-day work: how interesting the problem she's working on feels, how frustrated she feels when the tests don't detect a problem, and how hard it is to control operational costs. These frustrations are often the cause of low retention rates, and the developer experience can help address them.
Of course, the holy grail of any software team leader is somewhat vague developer velocity. We want the work to feel like a hackathon, prototyping new features in the morning and testing in the afternoon. We want customer feedback to be seen as a valuable resource, not more junk in the backlog log. Through a robust developer experience, we empower engineers to build the tools they need and be flexible with user feedback. In the next part of this series, I'll discuss the core principles and processes of the developer experience, and how to measure success.
If you'd like to join a community that implements Devex at a high level and discuss strategies for a smooth testing and deployment experience, join the Signadot Slack community and connect with others who are trying to speed up developers.