From DevOps to DevEx: Empowering the engineering experience
A new focus is emerging for companies that are dedicated to attracting and retaining the best tech talent: developer experience.
With emerging technologies dominating the news, tech talent remains as important as ever to businesses. The worldwide developer population is projected to reach nearly 29 million worldwide in 2024,1 outpacing the entire population of Australia—yet barely keeping up with the pace of demand, as we discussed in Tech Trends 2023.2 Despite this growth, developer productivity is far from optimized at most organizations: Developers typically spend only 30% to 40% of their time on feature development.3
Shifts to Agile, DevSecOps, and cloud engineering have all become mainstream in recent years because they enhance speed, quality, and cross-functional collaboration. Now, a new focus is emerging for companies that are dedicated to attracting and retaining the best tech talent: developer experience, or DevEx, a developer-first mindset that considers each touchpoint software engineers have with the organization to improve day-to-day productivity and satisfaction.4
Leaders agree that a good developer experience results in better end-user and customer experiences, increasingly shifting focus from measuring speed and quantity to providing the proper tools, platforms, and feedback mechanisms and ultimately creating a culture that works for developers. Metrics around speed—such as lines of code or story points per developer—are giving way to more holistic measures such as time-to-first pull request (how long it takes for a developer to publish their first major batch of code), backlog changes, and defect ratios.5 Decentralized teams and fragmented toolsets are giving way to pod structures that formalize collaboration across engineering, user experience, cyber, risk, quality management, and product teams, in addition to tailored performance management and streamlined architecture and tooling. The upside of all these changes? Eighty-one percent of companies have realized a moderate or significant impact on profitability from their investments in developer experience.6
Improving engineering experience can lead to a future state in which newly hired software engineers are productive from day one on the job, and a company’s internal technology landscape is thoroughly integrated with its business strategy. Looking forward, companies may look to the benefits of integrated intuitive tools and realize that the investments made for developer experience may enable other aspects of the business to drive tech value.
Now: Engineers are in high demand but hindered
Digital transformation was kicked into high gear by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Eighty-five percent of global CEOs agree that their organizations have significantly accelerated transformation after 2020,7 and global spending on digital transformation is expected to reach US$2.51 trillion in 2024, nearly double the amount spent in 2020.8 This increased investment has led to an elevated role for tech leaders and employees, as discussed in our 2023 Global Technology Leadership Study.9 Organizations across industries—not just tech—are adding software to their core offerings and operational infrastructure. Think of, for example, auto manufacturers’ autonomous driving algorithms and vehicle connectivity platforms that enable new mobility services; industrial manufacturers’ use of connected equipment like turbines and generators to collect performance data, identify issues before failures, and optimize maintenance scheduling; and consumer brands’ virtual try-on apps that use augmented reality to let shoppers digitally try on clothes. Software engineering excellence, and the developers who bring those capabilities, is critical for companies to capitalize on these transformation opportunities.
As a result, the demand for developers has skyrocketed. Jobs in software development are expected to grow by 25% within the next decade, compared with an 8% average growth rate for other professions.10 And that’s not just within the tech industry. In fact, only 10% of new software developer roles are concentrated in tech companies, as the need for digital goods and services across industries is only poised to grow in the years to come.11
Companies across government and commercial sectors are following the developer experience practices established by tech-forward companies to attract and retain developers. For example, the implementation of continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines drives more frequent code releases; the notion of “shifting left” calls for adopting automation and testing earlier in the software development process;12 and full-stack engineering exposes tech talent to the full spectrum of development on a product (front end, back end, web, and so on) through simulations, apprenticeship models, and rotations.13
Yet, despite the demand for software developers, many companies have not cleared the roadblocks to developer productivity and satisfaction (figure 1).14 Time spent on configuration, tool integration, and debugging takes away from time spent building new features and applications that can grow revenue.15
Moreover, developers typically deal with a notoriously homogenous and noninclusive culture that hinders job satisfaction.16 And on top of this, the proliferation of low-code and no-code platforms such as Appian, Outsystems, and Zoho Creator has lowered the barriers to software development, enabling the “citizen developer” movement. While this brings new opportunities, such as enabling faster innovation by decentralizing software development across the business, it could also pose potential risks around governance, security, and tech debt accumulation.
The problems that engineering leaders face when designing leading developer experiences are multifaceted. Instead of making one-off changes, a holistic change in engineering experience can help attract and retain the best talent by arming them with the tools, performance measures, and processes to succeed.
New: The DevEx difference
While the shift to DevOps focused on productivity tools and frameworks, developer experience consists of a range of mutually reinforcing capabilities that an organization provides to maximize developer productivity and satisfaction, which operate in a virtuous cycle. Developers empowered with the right tools, processes, and culture typically perform better. In fact, according to the Harvard Business Review, employees are 230% more engaged and 85% more likely to stay beyond three years in their jobs if they feel they have the technology that supports them at work.17 In turn, developers who are satisfied are able to move fast, deploy code frequently, and collaborate in ways that enable efficiency.
To enable this virtuous cycle, organizations need a new, thorough framework that considers all aspects of impact to developers, not just tooling or talent (figure 2). Shifts in DevEx could then manifest in improvements in product performance and customer experience.
Platforms and tools
One aspect of establishing an effective developer experience is providing standardized platforms and tools. Though the notion may seem simple, it is far from simple in action. Developers today often wrestle with an average of more than 250 software-as-a-service applications and other technical environments that are poorly integrated and cause fragmentation of knowledge across teams.18 Companies can address this inefficiency through three key capabilities:
- Architecture--Maximizing polygot modularity and maintainability to promote scalability, reusability, and reliability.
- Measurement tools—Garnering data on platform health, product usage, and developer efficiency.
- Enablement tools—Creating tools to ensure collaboration and knowledge-sharing among engineers.
Leading organizations are acting on this trend by creating a one-stop platform for developers, where they can access a source code repository, onboarding information, documentation, tools, software development kits, and more. Only 37% of developers have access to such a portal today,19 but Gartner estimates that by 2025, 75% of organizations with platform teams will provide self-service developer portals to improve developer experience and accelerate innovation.20
Ways of working and flow
Once the ideal technologies (that is, platforms and tools) are in place, the second aspect of DevEx is building clear, continuous processes for developers so they can accomplish tasks in a flow, without facing friction from disconnected systems or poor governance. Organizations can focus on three capabilities here:
- Development accelerators—Enhancing efficiency and reducing friction in day-to-day development activities.
- Service ownership—Owning and integrating responsibilities across the life cycle to reduce risk.
- Workflow management and DevSecOps—Increasing organization and coordination of activities to drive consistent outcomes.
The ideal developer experience would likely entail a single process and pipeline across the organization for code validation and testing, performance measurements, and safe rollbacks of code without causing outages. While cutting-edge tech organizations are working to approach this scenario, enterprises across industries are making progress on maturing their developer experience across the capabilities outlined above.
For instance, CarMax, the largest used car retailer in the United States, has found clear success in modernizing development processes.21 The technology team replaced a project-based operating model with a product-based model made up of cross-functional teams. Instead of measuring developers on projects completed, CarMax began setting transparent quarterly objectives for more frequent delivery. It also placed a huge focus on rapid testing of products with associates and customers so that it could gather feedback and iterate before rolling out a new feature. In a similar vein, after Etsy invested 20% of its engineering budget in developer experience, it was able to scale its organization from 250 people to almost 1,000.22
Talent experience
Finally, for process and technology changes to be accepted, the culture must be conducive to a more modern engineering experience. Developers in many companies still specialize in traditional mainframe languages and ways of working, but others are eager to spend their time on innovation toward a purpose that resonates with them. Companies looking to attract and retain such talent can build out these capabilities:
- Community and culture—Promoting a fun, productive, and diverse workplace environment (much needed in most technology divisions).23
- Learning—Developing education pathways for engineers throughout their careers. With more tech talent learning skills from a wide variety of resources and methodologies (including blogs, online coursework, books, and formal education), it is more important than ever for organizations to standardize onboarding and training.24
- Career progression and development—Mobilizing advancement opportunities for engineers at all stages of their careers, as discussed in last year’s Tech Trends.25 For example, Citibank has defined career paths for engineers who want to keep building their technical skills, allowing them to stay current with coding trends.26
Most importantly, a shift in culture can help companies realize that developers shouldn’t be measured in the same way as other employees. Because developers are often asked to build new features and work in an experimental capacity, standards of velocity and quality won’t always be accurate measures of learning or growth. Rather, tech talent needs an avenue to collectively brainstorm, learn from others, and feel connected to end goals.
CarMax paid close attention to talent experience, not just process, when undergoing its own transformation. On top of physically moving employees to sit in cross-functional teams so IT wouldn’t be isolated, it organized product showcases. Every two weeks, engineers would present on technology capabilities in development, along with outcomes and lessons learned, to increase transparency and hear feedback from senior leadership. To further signify the elevated role of the technology team, the IT department was also formally renamed CarMax Technology, with a focus on business outcomes over traditional IT requirements and deadlines.
Next: Every employee is a tech employee
Companies often hope to hire “10x” engineers, those who are 10 times as productive as the average developer. But searching for unicorns in the talent market is rarely a winning strategy. Instead, with the right platforms, process, and culture in place, 10x engineers could become much less rare. Especially as generative AI continues to bolster developer productivity and opens up a future of increased workplace automation, many of today’s hindrances may not be relevant in the next five to 10 years. As we mentioned in last year’s trend on “serial specialists,” engineers who are interested in challenging themselves can use productivity enhancements to free up their time and work on new and interesting projects and technologies over the course of their career.27
Crucially, the work organizations do in the next few years to set up a new developer experience won’t be contained to the technology division. As technology itself continues to become more and more central to the business, technology tasks and required talent will likely become central as well. Standardized tools and platforms, like the ones discussed above, as well as advanced low- or no-code tech, may one day enable all employees of a business to become low-level engineers.
Instead of transforming from a 1x to a 10x engineer, employees outside the tech division could be going from zero to one. These citizen developers are likely to be empowered by a future where the most common programming language is not Python or Java but English, or whatever natural language they choose.
Depending on how quickly automation improves, more employees should carry out basic technology tasks in the years to come or simply oversee automated digital processes. Expanding the pool of technologists then allows experienced engineers to focus on the highly complex tasks and novel builds on which they’re excited to work. By all accounts, the opportunity to focus on cutting-edge innovations and challenging problems is likely to bolster both productivity and satisfaction for the next generation of developers.