Developer experience a human quantum of business value

Software development is an inherently humans-based, intellectual activity.

  • If your organisation is following Agile methodology for driving the project, then usually the first thing you do as a developer is to attend standups, where you share, what you have done yesterday, What you are doing today and what are your existing blockers. And from this first activity of the day, your experience at work starts.
  • Once you are done with stand-up, you get on with your development activities for at least a few uninterrupted hours. You will resolve queries of your managers and consumers of your software/service in parallel by directing them to the documentation you have for the service.
  • Once you are done with the code, you will test your code and get immediate feedback on the test it its integrations.
  • You will take out some dedicated time to help junior developers in your team to proceed ahead in their development using guidelines and best practices the team is following.
  • You deploy your code in the environment using an automated pipeline into the respective environment for other teams to test or use it. Once testing is concluded you have to deploy the code in production using continuous deployment.
  • By end of the day, your will wrap up your work and leave the day, with a feeling of achievement and a meaningful contribution to your team.
  • You as a developer start your day with standup, stating your progress on stories you are working on.
  • You call out your blockers for the fifth time in these standups. Since you are dependent on other teams to unblock you and the issue you have raised is not of priority for them, therefore you are still blocked
  • Your team members are progressing ahead with their tasks, which gives you a feeling of being left behind
  • Once the standup is done you try to reach out to the team you are dependent on for the 100th time, and it seems to you that they have put you on ignore. The feeling of frustration is increasing.
  • You reach out to your team members but they are so overloaded with work items that they have no time to help you.
  • There is no documentation you can follow to resolve the issue by yourself.
  • In parallel, you are pinged by your manager to resolve his queries, since you are blocked you cannot be of much help.
  • By the end of the day when you are warping at work, you feel demotivated and frustrated.

Before moving further, let’s understand what developer experience is and why you need good developer experience.

What is Developer Experience (DX)?

Why do you need a great Developer experience (DX)?

Why would a developer put up with a poor developer experience when they can likely find a job that better aligns with their needs and preferences?

Now that we have a point of view of what developer experience is and why we need it, let’s understand the factors which can impact developer experience.

Factors which impact developer experience

  • Discoverability of documentation and expertise.
  • How quickly work is integrated with other teams.

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Software engineer, Big data application architect and programming language enthusiast. A guy who like technical discussions . Author on www.cloudkapoor.com

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AK

Software engineer, Big data application architect and programming language enthusiast. A guy who like technical discussions . Author on www.cloudkapoor.com