What is Developer Experience and why you should care

As technology moves forward “close to the speed of light” and new products and frameworks are introduced every year, so do change the needs of users. It is easy to think that your own developers or developers using your services will do with whatever you provide them with, truth to be told though, it may be true to some extent.

So in case you struggle with poor performance of developers or high fluctuation of your developer staff, this is the right article for you.

In this article we will look further into what is Developer Experience, how it change the way your business works and why you should consider implementing its principles.

What is DX

So, you have been introduced with a new term — Developer Experience. It means providing developers with everything they need to fully focus on doing their work the best way possible. Developer Experience can be further distinguished between internal and external Developer Experience.

Internal DX

Internal Developer Experience aims to streamline processes within the team of developers and remove any obstacles that developers might face. It covers these areas of work:

• with cutting off activities which they do not find interesting nor needed for their job (e.g. getting rid of ),
• starting new activities (such as ,  and many others),
• removing bottlenecks in development (such as ),
• using the right tools for the job (ranging from the  to run projects to the right IDEs to work with)
• and last but not least having a good team dynamic (such as  and providing coworkers with )

If I were to ask you a question — who will do a better job, a person who’s environment is nurturing and welcoming or a person whose job is hard to get excited about? I believe you guessed it yourself. And since developers are one of the most dug up stakeholder groups working on your project, it is important to make them feel happy as well as that their work is important and helps others.

Focusing on your team of developers directly saves costs due to fluctuation and the resources spent when the team is understaffed.

External DX

Now, contrary to internal DX there is external DX which represents ease of use of tools developers use. These tools range from using IDEs, and frameworks over APIs of services they integrate and use to SDKs they integrate in their applications. Each of the parts has different metrics that should be followed, but the most important and common one is usability — how hard it is to get on board, how easy it is to work with it and how good is troubleshooting or support.