Why your DevEx journey matters
Despite software development’s rich legacy of over 70 years, a surprising number of companies still overlook the management of their developers’ experience, an essential aspect that can significantly enhance innovation and productivity. Could Developer Experience revolutionize the tech industry just as UX transformed the client experience?
Developer Experience (DevEx) is a relatively new concept that encompasses the holistic journey and environment in which software developers perform their work, but how does it translate into actual actions that will improve the daily lives of the people working in your organization?
Let’s find out together…
Developer Experience (DevEx): A definition
DevEx is about making developers happy and eventually more productive by optimizing their tools and processes, but it is also about enhancing the workflows to boost their efficiency, creativity, and satisfaction.
By nature, the exact definition of DevEx is specific to each company. Want to understand more about how we defined it at Criteo? Look at this blog post from Clement Boone.
By prioritizing developer-friendly interfaces, automated tasks, and rapid feedback loops, DevEx aims to minimize friction and empower developers to produce high-quality software with speed and enjoyment.
You could argue this is nothing new, and you would be right. Let’s look at how we have been managing developer experience until now…
Existing frameworks and paradigms
Developer Experience is an emerging field of expertise built upon the knowledge and practices explored by various frameworks and research studies. Let’s look at the main paradigms.
The DORA Metrics (2014)
DORA is a well-known research organization that has developed a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of DevOps practices. Monitoring these metrics helps teams assess the impact of their DevOps efforts on the development process, deployment speed, and system reliability.
DORA metrics include:
- Deployment Frequency: How often code is deployed to production.
- Lead Time for Changes: The time it takes to go from code commit to production deployment.
- Mean Time to Recover (MTTR): The time it takes to recover from incidents or failures.
- Change Failure Rate: The percentage of deployments that result in failures.
- Reliability: The measured availability, performance, or accuracy of the service.
While DORA metrics can be useful in some contexts, they come with issues that could lead your organization in the wrong direction. In other words, those metrics should not be used in isolation but instead in combination with other data points.
- Lack of focus on people: DORA metrics are purely technical and do not reflect the satisfaction, well-being, or performance of the developers working in the organization.
- Lack of focus on the value delivered: Frequent delivery of small items will push the metrics up regardless of the value those changes bring to the organization or their quality.
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps (2018)
Accelerate is a book by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, which presents a research-based approach to software development and DevOps practices, focusing on how high-performing organizations achieve better software delivery and organizational performance.
The book introduces a framework built upon extensive research and empirical data collected over multiple years. The framework defines several key metrics and practices associated with high-performing teams and organizations. These metrics align closely with the DORA metrics mentioned above, as DORA is one of the research efforts that contributed to the insights presented in this book.
Over the past years, we’ve seen more and more companies (especially IT services companies) promoting Accelerate as a way to become more efficient and productive, but we should not forget that Accelerate is not a one-fit-all solution but merely a compass pointing us toward the best practices and solutions that worked at other companies.
The SPACE framework (2021)
The SPACE framework is a research-based approach to measuring, understanding, and improving developer productivity.
This framework was developed by a group of researchers from GitHub, Microsoft, and the University of Victoria (Canada), and it encourages engineering leaders to have a holistic approach to developer productivity.
The SPACE framework identifies five dimensions for developer productivity:
Satisfaction and well-being
“Satisfaction is how fulfilled developers feel with their work, team, tools, or culture; well-being is how healthy and happy they are, and how their work impacts it.”
Performance
“Performance is the outcome of a system or process.” (for whatever it means in the specific context of your organization in terms of quality, productivity, impact…)
Activity
“Activity is a count of actions or outputs completed in the course of performing work.” These include outputs like design documents and actions like incident mitigation.
Communication and collaboration
“Communication and collaboration capture how people and teams communicate and work together.”
Efficiency and flow
“Efficiency and flow capture the ability to complete work or make progress on it with minimal interruptions or delays, whether individually or through a system.”
The Three Dimensions of DevEx (2023)
Through a whitepaper written by Abi Noda (from getdx.org) and the team behind the SPACE framework, the three dimensions of DevEx came in 2023 as a simplified, more practical version of the framework.
According to this article, DevEx really comes down to mastering the art of Flow State, lightening the Cognitive Load, and perfecting Feedback Loops.
Cognitive Load
Context-switching, overly complex processes, and unnecessary tasks kill productivity and drag down the developers’ satisfaction.
Feedback Loops
Fast, frequent and meaningful feedback loops through the entire development lifecycle reduce friction and interruptions and contribute to the continuous improvement of the overall process.
Flow State
Complete work or make progress on it with minimal interruptions or delays.
The impact and performance of this model was studied in this whitepaper from GitHub and DX, published in 2024. Without surprise, it successfully demonstrated the strong relationship between operational performance and developer experience.
DevEx, yet another gimmick?
We’re seeing so many new trends in our industry, but often, those new methodologies or tools are not put into practice the way they should. Take Agile, for example: how many companies are actually doing it the right way? How many companies really get some value out of it?
To remain time and resources efficient, we must apply DevEx only when it makes sense to do so, with our expectations and constraints stated clearly upfront.
We might be stating the obvious here, but seamless tools, intuitive interfaces (UX/UI, APIs…), and developer-friendly documentation let developers focus on solving problems and delivering business value. This has more or less always been the case, and DevEx is just a way to put this under a managed process.
In a way, this is aligned with the Lean principle of getting rid of all kinds of waste to achieve flow, as defined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in his eponymous book.
Time is money
According to a 2018 survey by Stripe, engineering teams spend an average of 41% of their time dealing with bugs, technical debt and maintenance.
In other words, this means companies waste billions of dollars because of avoidable inefficiencies in the software development process. Improving DevEx can help reduce this time and allow developers to focus on value-added tasks, positively impacting an organization’s revenue and innovation while lowering costs.
At Criteo, our 2023 perception-based developers survey showed that our developers were wasting — or at least, believed they were wasting — around 20% of their time on development environment-related issues alone. We had to do something about it!
While those problems can be hard to identify or could feel petty if not backed by meaningful data, addressing them in a consistent, data-driven way can surely bring significant benefits to the organization.
An organizational booster
A great Developer Experience accelerates development cycles, fosters creativity, and helps attract top talent. By continuously challenging the experience we offer to our developers, we achieve the following goals:
- Increase engagement & retention
- Increase productivity
- Reduce friction
- Onboard faster newcomers
- Attract (more) top talents
- Deliver higher-quality code
- Enhance collaboration
At Criteo, we’re organizing an annual Devx Days event where each team gets to share with the rest of the organization what they learned about developer experience and foster the adoption of the best practices and tools at their disposal.
DevEx, another name for User Experience (UX)?
The ultimate goal of DevEx is to increase developer productivity and satisfaction by improving the tools, processes, and workflows developers use to perform their daily software development work.
UX (User Experience), on the other hand, is about optimizing how end-users interact with and experience a product or service. It focuses on making the user’s journey intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable, ultimately aiming for high customer satisfaction.
In other words, UX is a good practice for the teams to design better User Interfaces and deliver a smoother User Experience to their developers or clients.
While the concept of DevEx isn’t entirely novel, adopting a managed approach will introduce the necessary awareness to facilitate change in a deliberate and systematic manner. Our industry is just embarking on a long journey; let’s see where it leads us.
We have set the stage by defining what DevEx means, now let us try to define in a next article how it can or should impact the organization. To be continued…
Did you enjoy reading this article? You can find all our articles about Developer Experience on the Criteo R&D Blog.
