Developer Experience (DevEx) is a general term that encompasses all of the interactions a developer has with their work environment. The tools that a developer uses, the processes they employ, and even the organizational culture, all play a role in establishing a great Developer Experience – or, unfortunately, a bad one.
A well-designed Developer Experience environment suggests an environment that is beneficial and conducive to development work, resulting in positive developer sentiment and efficient use of resources. A negative Developer Experience environment reflects the opposite – a working environment that is filled with frustrations and blockers that ultimately have a marked impact on the quality of developer output as well as their general view of the company, the product, and their work.
When supportive tools and processes empower developers, they deliver high-quality software faster and more reliably – and, more pointedly, they are far more likely to have a favorable view of the product or products that positively impact their Developer Experience. Poor Developer Experience is likely to frustrate developers and lead to a harmful product perception, even if the core product itself is worthwhile, beneficial, and unique. Ultimately, focusing on DevEx is not just about improving workflow – it’s a strategic move that leads to better outcomes for development products and overall business success.
The Importance of a Positive Developer Experience
A positive developer experience significantly impacts development teams. A well-crafted developer experience will result in a more efficient operating environment where solid tooling and streamlined workflows support high-quality code and meaningful contributions.
From a broader point of view, a good developer experience will naturally favor intuitive tools, feedback mechanisms that help guide development without unnecessarily high cognitive load, and systems that favor low-friction production over high-difficulty production. In essence, a positive developer experience will make development something your developers actually want to do and will result in your product becoming a product users want to actually use.
This has some massive benefits on the micro and macro levels.
The Micro Benefits of Good DevEx
Zooming into the individual and team view, this positive developer experience will result in a team that wants to utilize and streamline workflows, improve code quality, adopt coding standards and a holistic approach focused on total product quality, and ultimately, be aligned with business goals and revenue growth objectives.
Developers aren’t just machines that ingest resources and output a widget – they are living, breathing people, and their needs and priorities will naturally significantly affect the final output of any process. Making your environment one that is easy to use will result in a higher quality product that is easier to use and consume. Likewise, making your environment one that makes coding secure and generates highly accurate code easily will result in code that is secure and highly accurate. Believe it or not, making an environment that supports collaboration will, unsurprisingly, spur collaboration! You get the idea – this is essentially the “build it, and they will come” of product development.
The Macro Benefits of Good DevEx
Zooming out, this also means that organizations will have a much easier time setting (and sticking to) organizational goals and productivity metrics and will likely see significant benefits in tack-on product development and experience. In many cases, good developer experience can even result in increased customer satisfaction, higher LTV (lifetime value) for secondary users and greater success in the marketplace. Making your developer experience a positive experience will have tack-on effects.
Ultimately, an effective developer experience can drastically affect a company’s ability to perform in the market and significantly impact team dynamics, communication, collaboration, code security, and much more!
Considering the Flow State
One major benefit of a strong DevEx approach is the bolstering of the so-called “flow state”. The flow state is a mental condition of deep focus and immersion, where individuals tend to lose track of time and become fully absorbed in their tasks.
In software development, this particular mental state can result in teams that are highly collaborative, easily communicate complex concepts, tackling problems with clean and efficient code that leverages creativity as much as experience. Many other creative fields experience this state – it’s the “zen” that is experienced by high-performance athletes, the artist spirit experienced by famous painters, or the ecstatic creative energy that allows a writer to author a novel in a week.
In the development world, this state can lead to significant breakthroughs and higher-quality work. Fostering the conditions that lead to this state is absolutely critical to ensuring your product doesn’t stand in the way of success.
By minimizing distractions, providing the right tools, and considering the experience of the human developing the product, organizations can enable developers to reach this state more often, resulting in productivity boosts as well as improved satistfaction.
What Makes a Good Developer Experience?
This, of course, raises the question: what makes a Developer Experience good?
While there are as many development preferences as there are developers in the world, some general categories should be focused on to deliver an exceptional developer experience.
Low-Friction
“Friction” is the resistance between two materials to movement. In the case of development, it’s exactly what it sounds like – it measures how difficult it is to get something from one state to another. This friction can occur at every level, from the lowest to the highest.
Consider for a moment what it takes to deploy code. You have the entire code base that you’ve checked for errors, reviewed, and are comfortable with – as you submit it, you’re excited to move the content into production and see whether all your development has paid off. As you push the code, you receive a notice that the push has failed – but you receive no error code and no information as to why. You try again, only to be met with the same fail state.
This is a good experience of a high-friction event. Even if the initial development was low friction, the fact that you’re getting a fail state without error codes and without any idea of how to rectify the problem could make you feel upset, angry, and frustrated.
Now imagine if your development environment had that same attention to detail paid to every other facet of development. You receive an error code for type safety – but no information about what’s wrong. You get an alert about an invalid argument but no line reference for the argument. Even creating the initial code boilerplate might take three discrete steps.
In such a case, you would experience high friction and, if forced to use this solution, would likely do just what was necessary to get the code live. This would result in poorly reviewed code that is frustrating to error check and likely irritating to use.
Conversely, consider a development environment that allows you to develop with supportive infrastructure and tooling. Manual steps are mitigated with automatic local copying, case suggestions, safety alerts, etc. This would be a joy to code in and – more likely than not – is an environment in which you would write better code that is more accurate and easier to use.
This is a massive element of a good developer experience.
Strong Feedback Loops and Collaboration
One of the hallmarks of an effective team solution is making it easy to be a team. Working as a team carries with it a lot of complexity and difficulty, and any steps that stand in the way of collaborative development and iteration will only amplify these struggles to the extreme. The same team can use two wildly different tools, and while one might result in significant gains in collaborative development and iterative output, the other might result in team infighting and loss of efficiency.
What makes a great DevEx solution for teams is a strong feedback loop collection. Feedback loops are essentially mechanisms that allow a developer to rapidly iterate, integrating feedback, error checking, and other systems to make it easy for developers to continue their efforts.
In conjunction with these systems, collaborative tooling reduces the barrier to working together. This can include multi-user development environments, robust version control systems, synchronized resource representations, and other such solutions. This will allow developers to “be on the same page”.
Together, these tools result in a developer experience that has improved and simplified development workflows which reduce the stress on other teams and individuals, thereby improving the holistic view and productivity of the entire collaborative unit.
Comprehensive Support and Documentation
Providing effective and comprehensive support and documentation goes a long way toward improving the experience of all product developers and users. This is doubly so for developers who often code in “uncharted waters,” iterating on experimental feature sets and approaches that may not have a solid footing.
Being able to reference support and documentation for features that have such tools can create a supportive matrix that can ease this development stress, improve overall time to market, and reduce the likelihood of misalignment or errors in development.
Notably, this can also significantly reduce tack-on effects of product confusion, such as abandonment. Many products are not abandoned because they are bad, but because they are confusing – reducing this confusion for your developer community will result in long-term systemic impacts that reduce the confusion for the end user and consumer, resulting in a more user-friendly product that is typically more secure, well-built, and functional.
Meet The Dev Where They Are
Finally, one of the most essential factors in good DevEx is meeting your developers where they are. Developers have pretty specific needs for a given product and use case, and no development environment can ever accommodate all developers. Accordingly, your best bet is to provide the development environments needed for your specific use cases.
For developers, this can take various forms. Specific tools are more appropriate for specific use cases—for instance, container curation is more appropriate for organizations using something like Docker or Kubernetes for their application development, whereas an internal developer platform is far more focused on things like onboarding or service discovery.
One approach is to abstract this issue and shift the integrative development left. A great example is the traffic replay and mirroring approach, which simulates user requests using production data. This effectively bypasses many other development environment approaches, allowing you to build how you need to build and unify your developer experience on top of actual data rather than simulated data or packaged slugs.
How Speedscale Can Elevate Your Developer Experience
Speedscale is a solution that organizations can deploy to improve overall satisfaction for their developers and engineering teams. Adopting Speedscale can result in a development environment that allows developers to work efficiently and happily, delivering major benefits to key developer experience metrics while unlocking ease of development at scale.
Let’s look at just a few ways Speedscale can improve your developer experience.
Speedscale Bypasses Staging
The Staging environment is the point of reproducing Production to try and replicate what your data does in the real world. This can be a high-friction endeavor, and worst of all, this process often isn’t even a very accurate one! Using Staging might seem like an easy way to get to market, but it can result in a product that is shadowboxing an environment which might not exist.
Speedscale adopts a different strategy through the use of traffic replay. By deploying key components which track and record real traffic, this traffic can then be replayed, creating realistic responses that mirror actual production operation. This means you get to code in the real world – not a fantasy one – resulting in more accurate, secure, and effective code, as well as a coding process which is less stressful. In other words – you get to improve developer happiness by bringing real data to bear!
Speedscale Can Spice Things Up!
In some cases, you won’t have any real-world data to replicate a specific scenario. For instance, you may want to simulate a broken endpoint, a dead database, or horrible service latency, but you don’t want real-world data to compare to! With that in mind, how can you identify areas that need improvement without risking the actual service?
Speedscale has you covered. Not only can it simulate chaos through mocked faults, but it can also test load with high scalability, allowing you to test the worst-case scenario without a worst-case cost. Continuous delivery depends on identifying key metrics and utilizing automated testing to find potential faults at scale, but it’s often extremely costly. Speedscale helps you deploy this with a scalable and predictable cost!
Speedscale Boosts Visibility
Any good software development experience hinges on an effective understanding of the code and environment. You can’t code good software without having visibility into what that software does. Speedscale offers effective observation of the late-stage environment, allowing you to deepen your understanding of exactly what is happening in the inbound and outbound processes.
From here, this data can then be analyzed, breaking it into discrete pieces that can be tested, filtered, and inspected. This removes many repetitive tasks that are often required for user testing, traffic monitoring, and system performance data capture, allowing developers to gain more insight with less headache. Companies can benefit from the kind of deep insight that is usually delivered with much higher demands and costs with relative ease.
Speedscale is Easy to Use
There are more tools than ever before on the market. What makes for good developer satisfaction – and good developer productivity, for that matter – is having the right tools at the right time. That means that adopting a tool can’t be a headache in and of itself. Lowering the friction of adoption and ongoing use has significant impacts on the software development process and other continuous integration approaches and can mean the difference between a DevEx team whose developers feel supported and a DevEx team whose developers feel like they have the barebones on offer.
Thankfully, Speedscale is incredibly easy to get started with and is highly configurable for all kinds of traffic and environments. To improve the Developer Experience, you need to be able to provide multiple tools to both new developers and expert ones with a low barrier to entry, and Speedscale delivers this in spades.
Conclusion
Getting your Developer Experience right can be quite easy as long as you have a trusted partner with a proven solution. Speedscale is a powerful solution for many organizations. It can be deployed effectively at large and small scales to bring the power of traffic replay to almost any development pipeline.
To get started with Speedscale, register for a free trial or book a demo today!