DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity

We explore the concept of developer experience (DevEx) and its impact on productivity, efficiency, product quality, and employee retention—providing a practical framework for understanding DevEx and how to measure it.

May 3, 2023

Productivity

Abstract

Developer experience focuses on the lived experience of developers and the points of friction they encounter in their everyday work. In addition to improving productivity, DevEx drives business performance through increased efficiency, product quality, and employee retention. This paper provides a practical framework for understanding DevEx, and presents a measurement framework that combines feedback from developers with data about the engineering systems they interact with. These two frameworks provide leaders with clear, actionable insights into what to measure and where to focus in order to improve developer productivity.

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Authors

Abi Noda

Margaret-Anne Storey

Nicole Forsgren

Michaela Greiler

Introduction

Abi Noda is the founder and CEO at DX, where he leads the company's strategic direction and R&D efforts. His work focuses on developing measurement methods to help organizations improve developer experience and productivity. Before joining DX, Noda held engineering leadership roles at various companies and founded Pull Panda, which was acquired by GitHub in 2019. For more information, visit his website at abinoda.com.

Margaret-Anne Storey is a professor of computer science at the University of Victoria and holds a Canada Research Chair in human and social aspects of software engineering. Her research focuses on improving processes, tools, communication, and collaboration in software engineering. She serves as chief scientist at DX and consults with Microsoft to improve developer productivity.

Nicole Forsgren is a partner at Microsoft Research, where she leads the Developer Velocity Lab. She is lead author of the Shingo Publication Award-winning book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps. Her work on technical practices and development has been published in industry and academic journals and is used to guide organizational transformations around the world. For more information, visit her website at nicolefv.com.

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DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity

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