DevEx: What Actually Drives 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.