What is Developer Experience (DevEx, DX)?
Developer Experience (DX) refers to the overall environment in which developers work, encompassing the tools, processes, and culture they interact with daily. Much like User Experience (UX) focuses on creating a seamless and enjoyable journey for customers, DX is about optimizing the environment to empower developers to do their best work with minimal friction.
DX includes everything from the choice of programming languages and frameworks to the effectiveness of collaboration tools and the quality of internal processes. A positive DX enables developers to efficiently code, test, and deploy, free from unnecessary obstacles or frustrations.
Developer Experience (DevEx, DX) According to Top Tech Organizations
Why Developer Experience matters for Github | Gitlab | Microsoft | Uber | Stripe?
The Value of Investing in Developer Experience (DevEx, DX)
Boosting Productivity
When developers have access to a smooth, intuitive workflow, they can focus more on problem-solving and producing high-quality code rather than struggling with subpar tools or clunky processes. By investing in DX, companies can streamline operations, reduce unnecessary interruptions, and help developers concentrate on their core tasks.
Higher Quality Code
A well-thought-out developer environment encourages best practices and reduces the likelihood of errors. Tools that provide instant feedback on code quality, support automated testing, and integrate continuous delivery processes help developers catch issues early, resulting in more stable and reliable software. Great practical examples can be found at Github for Engineers.
Employee Satisfaction and Retention
In a competitive tech landscape, retaining top talent is crucial. A positive DX not only boosts developers' job satisfaction but also increases the likelihood that they will remain with the company. It fosters a sense of value and support, enabling developers to work more effectively and creatively.
Accelerated Innovation and Business outcomes
Innovation flourishes in environments where creativity is encouraged, and administrative hurdles are minimized. By enhancing DX, organizations can eliminate barriers that stifle innovation, allowing developers to experiment and iterate more freely and bring new ideas to market faster. DevEx has an impact on many businesses outcomes like time to market, user satisfaction, revenue growth and profitability.
Developer Experience [DevEx] talks with experts
#2 DevEx: flex the measure-act-learn muscle at scale in your dev teams
Our DevEx first talk with Benjamin Kitt // Software Development Manager at Lob.com, and Jon Kern, Co-author of the Agile Manifesto from @Adaptavist Group.
Key points:
🔑 What DevEx Surveys Bring to the Table:
- Human-centric, holistic approach to measuring progress.
- Actionable insights that align with real-world problems.
- Empowering teams with clear, measurable results.
💡 Key Areas of Impact:
- Team-Level Power: Insights become easier to act on—measurable, repeatable, and simpler to prioritize.
- Org-Level Power: Strengths and friction points identified at scale (10, 100, or 1,000 teams).
- Emergent Power: Accurate insights from all engineers involved.
- Elevated Power: Complex issues simplified and made easier to act on.
🔄 How to Get the Most Out of DevEx Surveys:
- Start with trust and frame the survey around real-world problems.
- Use existing tools and processes to take action.
- Demonstrate success regularly to build confidence, autonomy, and empowerment in your dev team.
#1 DevEx: measure & adapt in software development
DevEx Talk | measure & adapt in software development (youtube.com)
Our DevEx first talk with Ben Darfler, Director of Engineering, Honeycomb.io, and Jon Kern, Co-author of the Agile Manifesto from @Adaptavist Group. Key points:
- 💡 DevEx is about measuring and adapting differently in software development
- 🔢 Data sparks conversations that wouldn’t happen otherwise
- 🧑 On-the-ground insights reveal the true pains and priorities.
- 🤝 Deep work and collaboration are superpowers
- 🪜When things are complex and unknowable, just take a step
Developer Experience [DevEx] reports:
- October 2024 - The Microsoft Study – Factors Contributing to “Bad Days” for Software Developers – study
- October 2024 – The 2024 DORA Report – DORA’s Research Team, Google – report
- October 2024 – Beyond the Code – Network Perspective – quick study
- June 2024 – State of Developer Experience – Atlassian report
- June 2024 – The Engineering Leadership – LeadDev report
- May 2024 – Developer Experience at Work – Stack Overflow report
- May 2024 – State of the Developer Experience – Harness report
- February 2024 – AI’s impact on the developer experience – Github report
Developer Experience [DevEx, DX] statistics:
- 80% of developers are not happy at work
- 35% of engineering leaders are working longer hours in 2024 than before
- Reducing work interruptions leveraged developers' daily progress from 7% to as much as 82%
- Going from 2 to 3 meetings per day lowered the chances for a developer to make progress toward daily goals from 74% to 14%
- Developers want more collaboration. Developers in enterprise settings work with an average of 21 other engineers on projects—and want collaboration to be a top metric in performance reviews
- 52 minutes of code time per day is a median time per developer
- Developers manage on average 14 different tools
- 60% of organizations continue to release code on a monthly or quarterly basis
- 67% of developers report waiting more than a week to complete code reviews
- 42% of developers say they can't release code to production without risking failures
- 69% of developers lose 8 working hours or more a week to inefficiencies
- 44% of developers think testing code end-to-end isn’t fast or efficient
- 28% of developers say it takes at least a day or longer to build and test artifacts
- 52% of developers cited burnout as a reason their developer peers leave their job
- Happy, unhappy, or somewhere in between, all professional developers agree that improving quality of code and developer environments provide the most satisfaction at work
- Going from 2 to 3 meetings per day lowered the chances to make progress toward daily goals from 74% to 14%. And developers who average just one meeting per day have a 99% chance of knocking out high quality daily work
- 4 hours of deep work per day is an optimal deep work time for developers
- 41% of senior tech pros cite quality as the top issue in software delivery
- Collaboration and clarity are seen as key drivers of Developer Experience
- 64% of senior tech pros say lack of time is the biggest blocker to making improvements
- 54% of tech orgs use a collaborative, cross-functional approach to improve DevEx
- 45% of tech orgs plan to increase their investment in improving DevEx
Measuring Developer Experience with DevEx surveys
With DevEx surveys you can identify and remove daily roadblocks in developer experience to optimize processes, tools, and work environment for faster, high-quality delivery. Debt around the speed, ease, and quality of delivery, when not addressed, slows down developer progress every day. Developer Experience (DevEx) surveys highlight key friction points and spark discussions for improvement. DevEx is about sensing and responding differently to complexity. It places developers and their experiences at the center, fostering curiosity and encouraging deliberate action. DevEx takes a holistic view of every aspect of the software development process - as pictured below.
Enabling Developer Experience: The Role of Deep Work and Collaboration
Traditionally, tech companies have assessed developer productivity by tracking the flow of work—from code writing through to code review, merging, and deployment - a great example is DORA metrics. However, there’s a growing shift towards measuring Developer Experience (DevEx, DX). This approach emphasizes improving the day-to-day experiences of developers to ultimately enhance productivity and job satisfaction.
DevEx: A New Perspective
The tech industry is increasingly focusing on measuring developer experience to identify the challenges developers face in their daily work. Unlike traditional productivity metrics, which emphasize output, DevEx metrics concentrate on inputs across three critical areas: flow state, cognitive load, and feedback loops. By understanding these areas, companies can pinpoint obstacles and make targeted improvements to boost productivity.
Measuring and Enhancing DevEx
Measuring developer experience typically involves surveys aimed at identifying barriers and optimizing day-to-day operations and the tech stack. These surveys focus on understanding what needs to be improved in terms of speed, ease, and quality of the development process.
However, identifying areas for improvement is only the beginning. Implementing these improvements requires developers to have the capacity to focus deeply and collaborate effectively—two key drivers of a successful DevEx.
Deep Work and Collaboration: Pillars of a Strong Developer Experience
Deep work—the ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks—and effective cross-team collaboration are critical to enhancing DevEx. Deep work allows developers to enter a flow state, where they are fully immersed and highly productive. Meanwhile, streamlined collaboration ensures that communication and interaction between teams are seamless and efficient.
To deliver high-quality software, a development team must effectively manage time, scope, and human resources. Time represents the hours spent solving a problem, scope refers to the functionality of the completed work, and people encompass the skills and expertise each team member brings.
The effectiveness of a team’s output depends largely on how they utilize their time. Even the most talented engineers won’t succeed if their time is wasted on low-priority tasks or frequent interruptions. Software engineering is a creative process that demands uninterrupted periods of focus to reach peak productivity.
Work Smart AI: Enhancing DevEx Through Deep Work and Collaboration
Work Smart AI is an advanced tool designed to maximize deep work and promote deliberate collaboration—two essential elements for improving DevEx. By optimizing how developers use their time, Work Smart AI frees up capacity to tackle other DevEx challenges.
This AI-driven tool identifies and mitigates meeting and context-switching overload, enabling developers to spend more time on deep work and fostering intentional collaboration. It analyzes interactions that bypass traditional task management systems, processing calendar, chat, and email metadata at scale for over 20,000 tech professionals.
Work Smart AI allows teams to prioritize essential collaboration, avoid silos, shift from reactive to proactive collaboration, and focus on long-term projects rather than short-term fixes. Engineering leaders can measure their teams' time and collaboration investments, identifying inefficiencies and freeing up time for deep work.
By analyzing weekly team capacity and collaboration—taking into account tasks managed outside of traditional tools like Jira or GitHub—Work Smart AI provides a comprehensive view of the team's workload. This visibility helps leaders identify bottlenecks and areas where time is being wasted. Consequently, teams can streamline processes, minimize unnecessary context switching, and allocate more time to high-impact deep work.
Our data shows that developers face frequent interruptions, and studies indicate that 90% of developers spend less than two hours a day on focused coding. Work Smart AI aims to increase this percentage by optimizing time management, allowing developers to concentrate more on coding and less on administrative tasks.
Leveraging AI for Better DevEx
Work Smart AI operates by analyzing collaboration patterns, using metadata from calendars, chats, and emails, while ensuring complete individual privacy. Metadata is hashed at an individual level, with analytics performed at a team level (with a minimum of five people). This real-time operation functions as an autopilot for development teams.
The tool’s intelligence stems from its deep processing of anonymized collaboration data, supported by machine learning models trained on 100 million working hours and 2 billion interactions. Over 100 engineered metrics describe collaboration, deep work, and context switching, helping leaders identify and address the root causes of productivity disruptions.
Metrics are presented as easily digestible insights, with AI-driven benchmarks to contextualize them. An API allows for streaming these metrics to internal data warehouses, turning collaboration data into actionable business intelligence.
Additionally, Work Smart AI offers over 500 habit-building actions and micro-automations integrated with existing collaboration tools (e.g., Google Calendar, Inbox, Slack). These best practices, drawn from top development teams, help reduce time spent in meetings and on context switching, ensuring enough deep work time without compromising teamwork and communication.
By increasing available capacity, Work Smart AI empowers development teams to address other challenges, fostering a more productive and fulfilling work environment. Prioritizing deep work, minimizing distractions, establishing healthy work habits, and encouraging intentional collaboration create a supportive environment that enhances developer productivity and contributes to the successful delivery of high-quality software.
