What are some easy-to-execute ways of improving developer experience?
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Chief Technology Officer in Software5 months ago
I would suggest you do the following,1. Build a Service catalog of reusable assets, codify learnings through retrospectives into assets building a richer catalog of assets over time
2. Build Project/Program templates and integrate both Service catalogs and Templates into developer IDEs
3. Infuse AI Pair programming, automate routine tasks
4. Measure developer metrics and Gamify the developer experiences (# of assets, zero bugs, Most helpful dev) etc to drive higher engagement
Finally, create a dev committee that hears pulse on the ground and incorporate those suggestions into your ways of working!
VP of Engineering in Banking5 months ago
- Talk and listen to your developers- Shadow or pair with them to build empathy and understand their pain points
Field CTO in IT Services5 months ago
As a couple of respondents have already suggested, start by asking your devs about their lived experience of creating solutions using your organisations current tools, processes, work environment and culture. Assuming you get good participation and honest feedback, there are likely to be lots of pain points and frustrations, so ensure you also ask them about what is working well too. I would also include other contributors too who interact with developers such as security, product, infrastructure/operations, risk and control to get a broader view across the delivery landscape.Once you have the feedback, categorise the themes within the feedback and prioritise those which you can address locally with limited investment/time and make quick improvement so you can amplify a "you said, we did" message back to the community as you incrementally make improvements. Transparency and regular engagement are critical here to gain buy in and credibility.
Where the pain points are more systemic and more expensive/longer term to fix, investigate options and make the case for necessary investment if needed.
Key things are to establish some satisfaction (sentiment and NPS) metrics from the feedback as a baseline, and then track the impact as you make improvements, and do not treat gathering developer feedback as a one-off exercise. Also look for opportunities to learn from efficient and happy teams to see if you can apply their ways of working (processes/tools/culture etc) into other teams to lift dev capability and experiences.
To complement the survey/sentiment analysis side of the house you might also want to establish a baseline for flow type metrics (such as DORA) to observe the impact of the incremental changes you make to lift DevEx sentiment - this would give a clear(er) line of sight between the improvements you make and the pace of delivery from your developers.
Am happy to chat offline on this topic too.
Additionally, openAI can enable the developer to quickly develop his own testbeds for early validation without much effort.
These can help significantly improve developer experience.