Discover how developer experience can impact your bottom line 

If you’ve had the opportunity to lead a software development team in any capacity, you’re likely familiar with the fact that the success of your projects hinges on more than just the technical expertise of your team members.  

It’s quite possible that ensuring your team consistently delivers quality software on time is a concern that occupies your thoughts, even into the late hours – particularly if you’ve pinpointed it as an area requiring attention. 

If you’ve ever delved into strategies for boosting your team’s effectiveness, you’re likely familiar with the concept of developer experience, commonly referred to as DevEx or DX. 

Developer experience – what exactly is that? 

A brief history 

At first glance, one might assume that developer experience simply relates to the years of software-building expertise a development team has accumulated. Yes, that matters, but that’s not quite what it’s all about – once you dig a bit further. 

Upon further exploration, you’ll quickly notice that the notion of developer experience has a long history. The initial focus was placed on the tools used to create software – starting from when Ada Lovelace wrote her first computer algorithm on paper.  

Over the years, it has progressed from the days of wired programming through the eras of assembly language and punch cards, all the way to our contemporary era of sophisticated integrated development environments (IDEs). These modern IDEs boast features such as visual interface builders, live debugging tools, AI assistants, and so much more.  

You may have noticed a trend in the progression. While the evolution mentioned above primarily centers on the tools for executing programming tasks, each new era has generally aimed at aiding programmers in completing their work more efficiently. 

But wait, there’s more. 

The standardization of software engineering practices began to take hold in the 1970s, thanks to Dr. Winston W. Royce, who introduced the concept of the software development life cycle (SDLC) in his seminal 1970 paper, “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems.” This expanded the developer’s experience beyond merely the tools used for programming, encompassing the processes, systems, and technologies essential for delivering and maintaining high-quality software. 

The original waterfall SDLC model proposed by Dr. Royce has evolved over time, from the RUP (Rational Unified Process) and RAD (Rapid Application Development) eras to the Agile Scrum, Kanban and DevOps methodologies and practices that are currently mainstream. This is yet another trend that has progressively challenged the way software is delivered – all with the goal of improving the effectiveness of software development teams.   

Enterprise organizations tend to adopt new tools and technologies (e.g., requirements, management, design/modeling tools, source code management systems, etc.) when embracing and implementing these evolving processes and methodologies. This means developers must continuously adapt and learn new tools to complete their work efficiently. 

With the evolution in recent years towards a cloud-first strategy by enterprises, you may have also noticed the explosion of technologies, open-source libraries, package managers, languages, and services. And more tools, technologies, APIs, frameworks, and integrations are introduced almost daily. This results in an ecosystem where nearly everything developers could want or need to accomplish their tasks is at their fingertips – but at what cost? 

Add factors like geographically dispersed remote development teams spread across multiple time zones, potential language barriers, and diverse cultural differences, and it’s enough to make today’s developers scream! 

Developer experience defined 

By this point, you might recognize that the changes in the software development landscape aren’t solely about honing individual team member skills, but also about enhancing their collective efficiency. This idea is central to what the developer experience means. 

Developer experience or DevEx is generally defined as the tools, systems, technologies, processes, and cultures that influence the effectiveness of software development and delivery. 

Evaluating how a developer feels, as measured through user feedback and surveys, can be subjective. Measuring the outcome of their work, however, is not.   

Holistically examining how developer skills, processes, tools, and cultures positively or negatively affect software development and delivery time, velocity, quality, supportability, and maintainability defines the outcome of measuring developer experience. 

How developer experience can impact your bottom-line 

As a developer or development team leader, you are likely to relate to what Idan Gazi of GitHub is quoted as saying: “Building software is like having a giant house of cards in our brains. Tiny distractions can knock it over in an instant. DevEx is ultimately about how we contend with that house of cards.” 

Software developers are quite a distinctive bunch, akin to artists in many ways. They relish the creative thrill of crafting something ingenious and are eager to embrace any tool, process, or system that enhances their inventive pursuits. Conversely, any element that seems to stifle their creative flow is often met with resistance, and if imposed, it can adversely affect their innovation and productivity. 

I’m sure you’d agree that a non-efficient developer is a non-productive one, and any loss in productivity directly impacts your bottom line.

This should keep you up at night!  

In trying to address developer efficiency and productivity issues within your team, you should ponder over some of the very valid questions GitHub’s Gazit posed:  

“Is the tool making my job harder or easier? Is the environment helping me focus? Is the process eliminating ways in which I can make mistakes? Is the system keeping me in my flow—and confidently enabling me to stack my cards ever higher?” 

Obviously, these questions can’t be answered without involving developers. Most importantly, the culture you adopt within your development organization will either facilitate or impede your ability to extract the insights you need to make a positive impact on DevEx within your team. 

How you approach this will impact your bottom line, and any improvements you achieve in DevEx could impact your organization in the following specific areas: 

• Productivity and cost savings – stemming from efficiency gains. 
• Speed – resulting from automation and wait time elimination. 
• Consistency and quality – driven by standardization and knowledge sharing. 
• Talent retention – through the reduction of developer burnout. 
• Security and compliance – enabled by non-intrusive guardrails and oversight. 

What does a good developer experience look like?

If you’ve been a software developer or near a software development team for any length of time, you will notice that, besides their hate for unnecessary distractions, they absolutely hate mundane, repetitive work.   

On the other hand, they love anything (tools, processes, or systems) that eliminates those pain points and allows them to spend any extra time afforded them learning new ways (design patterns, programming languages, APIs, etc.) to help them innovate faster. This is great for productivity! 

Here are some factors you may consider in figuring out how to positively impact DevEx within your organization: 

Automate repetitive tasks  

• Prior to DevOps practices being introduced, with its “you build it, you own it” mantra, developers were able to create their software, throw it over the fence at the operations teams to build, deploy and maintain.  This freed developers to happily focus on their creative functions but resulted in real negative downstream impacts on overall organizational effectiveness and consistency in delivering and maintaining quality software.   
• DevOps is aimed at eliminating those negative downstream impacts, but places extra work, distractions and burden on developers. The adoption of any tools, processes, and/or systems that automates and eliminates the burdens of such non-core development tasks (such as CI/CD pipeline tooling, source code and deployment environment management, etc.) is generally viewed by developers as a positive outcome for the developer experience. 

Eliminate wait times  

• In a typical enterprise environment, development teams would happily take on new exciting projects, quickly determine what development environments and tooling they need to accomplish those tasks, only to end up having to wait for infrastructure teams (sometimes for weeks) to provision those environments. 
• This can crush the spirit of development teams and have real negative impacts on DevEx. Tools or platforms that provide development teams with the ability to self-provision their own environments and tooling – with appropriate guardrails – are positively received by development teams. 

Avoid unnecessary developer distractions  

• How much do you or your project management and architecture teams need to meet with or talk to your developers to obtain the inputs they need to provide project delivery and technical oversight? Keeping this to a minimum will boost both DevEx and productivity within your team.  
• Consider adopting platforms that provide those relevant insights to oversight teams through a self-service portal. 

Encourage collaboration and knowledge-sharing  

• A developer’s experience is greatly enhanced by how easily and readily they can gain new knowledge to either solve a problem or innovate something new. 
• Promoting a collaborative culture in a knowledge sharing environment, boosted by a self-service platform that enables those behaviors will positively impact DevEx within your team. 

Ease of adoption  

• Any new tool, process or system introduced to your development team should be easy to learn and incorporate into your developers’ day-to-day activities. For example, can the tool be adopted without the need to learn another scripting language, or completely changing the way developers perform their core function? 
• Anything that is seen as adding an extra burden will negatively impact DevEx within your team. 

Reusability  

• How easy is it for your development teams to discover and reuse existing services and capabilities within the enterprise?  

• Facilitating capabilities within your organization that promotes reuse will not only produce positive DevEx outcomes within your team, but productivity gains across the entire enterprise. 

Standardization and quality by default  

• Adopt a development environment and culture that promotes standardization and quality without impeding developers’ freedom to innovate.  
• Consider adopting tools and platforms that enable experienced platform teams and architects to shape the quality outcomes of deliverables using standardized templates that provide necessary guardrails without forcing development teams to adopt entirely new ways of getting their creative work done. 

How you can achieve good developer experience with Calibo 

Internal developer portals (IDPs) have emerged in recent years as one of the top enablers for producing positive developer experiences within enterprises. 

IDPs serve as the interface through which developers can discover, and access developer platform capabilities focused on orchestration that integrates multiple technologies and tools to automate and standardize repeatable processes – without impeding developers’ ability to innovate freely. Examples of such processes being CI/CD tooling and infrastructure provisioning. 

As Gartner states in the report “Innovation Insight for Internal Developer Portals” by Manjunath Bhat, Mark O’Neill, and Oleksandr Matvitskyy in 2023: “By 2025, 75% of organizations with platform teams will provide self-service developer portals to improve the developer experience and accelerate product innovation.”

With Calbo’s IDP, you can improve the productivity of your development team by 40-60% and accelerate deliveries by 50%.   

Calibo’s IDP supports capabilities that enable platform engineering practitioners to work with infrastructure, architecture and product teams to automate and establish template-based standards that enable development teams to self-provision their environments and tooling to quickly and efficiently execute their development tasks. 

The platform supports an API and is already integrated with 150+ top-tier technologies.  

Coupled with its intuitive and straightforward user interface, the Calibo platform offers a suite of specific out-of-the-box features. These capabilities directly address the factors we’ve discussed that are essential for achieving positive developer experience outcomes within your organization. 

Automate repetitive tasks  

• CI/CD pipeline configuration and automation (based on development project/product- specific tech stack selected by development teams). 
• Source code repo automation (based on development project/product-specific tech stack selected by development teams). 
• Containerized deployment orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker, etc.). 

Eliminate wait times 

• Accelerate development team onboarding and management 
• Pre-configure standard cloud infrastructure configurations (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Private Cloud) and machine configurations (vCPU, RAM, Storage) to enable self-service provisioning by project teams. 
• Standard tools and technologies selection and instance configurations for project teams’ consumption – including secrets management, IaC, agile planning and collaboration, document management, app dev tools, test automation, source code repo, CI/CD pipeline, deployment containers, security assessment, code quality, data tools, and more. 

• Self-service environment provisioning, automation and deployment stage promotions (e.g. Dev to QA, to Staging, to Prod). 

Avoid unnecessary developer distractions 

• Product release planning and auto-progress tracking 
• Centralized access to dashboards and reports, including agile metrics by product owners, release managers and executives. 
• Centralized issue and request management  
• Activity and pipeline status audit log collection scoping, scheduling, and reporting 

Encourage collaboration, knowledge sharing and reusability 

• Software product/service catalog 
• Software product/service catalog search and retrieval  
• Developer knowledge exchange and collaboration 
• Centralized requirements management  
• Centralized access to design and tech docs  

Ease of adoption

• Supports standard software development lifecycle concepts (define, design, develop, deploy). 
• Integrated with top-tier tools (e.g. Jira, Confluence, GitLab, VS Code, Docker. Kubernetes, jFrog, Terraform, Swagger, etc.) that developers are typically using or are familiar with. 
• End-to-end tech stack orchestration without forcing new development frameworks or design pattern adoption. 

Standardization and quality by default 

• Standardization templates and enforcement rules (policy, workflow approval, source code branch strategy, etc.)  
• Workflows and software development lifecycle management  
• Security assessment and assurance 
• Maturity assessment survey configuration management  
• Scorecards and maturity assessments 

Want to learn more about Calibo? Book a demo with us here.