December 12, 2024
At Jellyfish, we know that system data alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Sometimes, it takes both quantitative and qualitative insights to capture what’s really going on. This is especially true when trying to evaluate Developer Experience. For instance, metrics can’t tell you if your developers feel overworked or underappreciated, or whether they have the right motivators, tools and processes to do their jobs effectively.
The factors that influence DevEx span everything from the tools your team uses and the processes they follow to how supported they feel in their work environment. And providing and maintaining a good developer experience isn’t just good for team morale, it’s good for your company’s bottom line. DevEx is closely aligned with performance and productivity. According to recent Gartner research, teams with a high-quality developer experience are:
- 33% more likely to attain their target business outcomes
- 31% more likely to improve delivery flow
- 20% more likely to intend to stay with their employer
Similar research from Google shows that organizations investing in a healthy development culture – with employees who feel a sense of inclusion and belonging to a team – have a 30 percent higher rate of organizational performance. In a healthy culture, engineers can work more productively, are more satisfied with their jobs, and have less burnout.
It’s increasingly clear why DevEx is becoming a main priority for businesses today. How then should leaders evaluate Developer Experience? What tools and tactics do they need to ensure they’re getting the whole picture – qualitative and quantitative data included? Let’s take a closer look.
Finding the right tools to accurately capture Developer Experience: Build vs. Buy
There are a number of solutions available to help you gather feedback from your developers, so how do you determine which specific DevEx assessment tool is right for your organization or team? Is it even worth investing in a third-party product at all or can a homegrown solution work?
For Andrew Korbel, VP of R&D Operations and Chief of Staff at Clari – which employs 300 software engineers – his organization went from creating manual surveys to capture developer sentiment to taking a more streamlined approach.
“When I started working at Clari in February of last year, we created manual surveys to capture developer sentiment. That information was useful, but the manual process had key shortcomings – particularly as the organization grew to hundreds of engineers. After using Jellyfish to manage deliveries and investment allocations, we started using the platform’s DevEx product to automate our survey process.”
Clari now uses Jellyfish DevEx “to capture developer sentiment and generate data that will lead to a healthier engineering environment… Identifying, understanding, and solving for these differences is crucial to maintaining a healthy team and driving continuous improvement.”
When determining your organization’s own need, note that the right DevEx assessment tool should include:
- Up-front communications that explains why you’re running the survey, why your developers should make their voices heard, and what you’ll do with the results
- An engaging survey experience that makes responding to the survey effortless and fast
- Opportunities for developers to express satisfaction or dissatisfaction and to propose ideas for improvements
- A bank of survey questions that are relevant to developer experience and based on the latest research
- Easy survey setup and administration
- Underscoring the importance of anonymity and privacy – ideally so no one, not even survey administrators, can see who said what
- Shareable results at the organization and team level
- In-depth analysis, including detailed breakdowns of sentiment by team, role, and more
Below is a comparison of tools, including Jellyfish DevEx – a developer experience measurement tool in the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform – that helps organizations layer in developer sentiment data with quantitative developer experience metrics.
Ready to improve your organization’s developer experience? You can read The Free DevEx Playbook or get started with DevEx from Jellyfish today.
