five-essential-ways-to-improve-developer-experience

Developer experience is perhaps the most crucial ingredient in a mature engineering practice. Organizations that offer a great developer experience benefit from happier, more productive teams, while those that don’t see greater dissatisfaction, slower delivery cycles, and increased churn.

Based on the responses of those who have completed the Engineering Excellence Maturity Assessment, it seems that there are common gaps in the tools, capabilities, and resources needed to cultivate a truly great developer experience.

Here, I wanted to outline five essential ways to improve developer experience based on what we’re seeing in the data.

#1: Ensure all feature requirements are clearly defined.

A quarter of engineering leaders said that more than 70% of their requirements do not have clearly defined acceptance criteria. In these cases, developers are being set up to fail. They’re faced with a constant need to rework their code in an effort to meet an ambiguous brief, leading to friction with product teams, reduced confidence, and low satisfaction.

Tools that enable closer communication between product and engineering teams can help to overcome this problem, enabling them to jointly agree acceptance criteria at the outset of a project, so scope creep is kept to a minimum.

#2 Implement an automated software catalog.

The pressure to accelerate delivery cycles means engineering leaders need to reduce toil for their teams and eliminate unnecessary administration tasks. Asking engineers to manually document information about their services — such as metadata, status, and ownership — steals time from innovation and creates friction in their workflows. Despite this, only a fifth (21%) of engineering teams have a catalog that is automatically updated with software changes.

The most effective way to resolve this is to make automated cataloging capabilities accessible through an internal developer portal (IDP). Developers can then quickly document and discover all the information about the services they’re working on in a centralized platform with minimal effort.

#3 Enable fast, self-service provisioning for development environments.

Only a third (33%) of engineering teams can build and test a development environment within 15 minutes, which suggests the majority still rely on time-consuming manual processes. This creates additional toil for developers and makes it more difficult to ensure consistency across environment setups. Ultimately, that hinders productivity, slows innovation, and adds friction to delivery cycles.

Engineering leaders can significantly improve developer experience by equipping teams with intuitive self-service tools that allow them to instantly spin up pre-built and pre-configured environments to work in. Automating that process and enabling teams to launch it from their IDP eliminates the overhead of manual set-up and lets developers focus on getting stuck into their new feature or project.

#4 Move to smaller, more frequent code commits with automated checks.

Lengthy review cycles and large code commits have a significant impact on development velocity and efficiency, as well as software quality. Considering that nearly two-thirds (61%) of engineering leaders say their code reviews take more than a day, and 86% say the average commit size is 30 or more lines, there is clear room to improve coding hygiene.

The most effective way to achieve this is to encourage more frequent, smaller code commits, supported by automated tests and branching strategies that help developers to maintain quality without additional workload.

#5 Establish clear curricula and prescriptive learning paths for developers.

It’s important to invest in enabling developers to expand their skillsets and continue to grow and progress. Offering opportunities for continuous learning helps prevent developers from growing restless and feeling they need to move on to further their career. However, four in five (81%) engineering leaders do not have a structured curriculum for upskilling and reskilling developers.

This highlights a significant opportunity for engineering leaders to improve developer experience by introducing formalized learning and development programs. To be effective, these programs should include a mix of internal training and external certifications, ensuring engineers have the best opportunity to further their knowledge and learn new capabilities.