Authors: Michaela Greiler, Margaret-Anne Storey, Abi Noda Abstract: Developer experience is an important concern for software organizations as enhancing developer experience improves productivity, satisfaction, engagement and retention. We set out to understand what affects developer experience through semi-structured interviews with 21 developers from industry, which we transcribed and iteratively coded. Our findings elucidate factors that affect developer experience and characteristics that influence their respective importance to individual developers. We also identify strategies employed by individuals and teams to improve developer experience and the barriers that stand in their way. Lastly, we describe the coping mechanisms of developers when developer experience cannot be sufficiently improved. Our findings result in the DX Framework, an actionable conceptual framework for understanding and improving developer experience. The DX Framework provides a go-to reference for organizations that want to enable more productive and effective work environments for their developers. Journal First Presentation of a TSE paper Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06352 YouTube link for video of talk (pre conference): https://youtu.be/ChaQ9E2ZIiE

1. An Actionable Framework for
Understanding and Improving
Developer Experience
Michaela Greiler Margaret-Anne Storey Abi Noda
ESEC/FSE 2022 Presentation of Journal First Paper Published at TSE 2022
mgreiler margaretstorey abinoda

2. The SPACE of developer productivity
S – Satisfaction & Well Being
P – Performance
A – Activity
C – Collaboration & Communication
E – Efficiency & Flow
Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey, Chandra Maddila, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck, and Jenna Butler.
2021. The SPACE of Developer Productivity: There's more to it than you think. ACM Queue. 2021

3. EXPERIENC
E
DEVELOPER

4. Once upon a time, there were two
software developers who worked for a social
media company that was recently acquired
in a hostile takeover….

5. What is developer experience?
How developers
Feel about
Think about and
Value their work
Fabian Fagerholm and Jürgen Münch. 2012. Developer experience: concept and definition. In Proceedings of the
International Conference on Software and System Process (ICSSP '12). IEEE Press, 73–77.

6. Our research aim…
An actionable conceptual framework to understand
and guide developer experience

7. Our study
Semi-structured interview study with 21 developers from different companies
Guiding (and emergent) research questions:
1) What important factors affect developer experience
2) What contextual characteristics influence factor importance
3) What barriers impede positive experience
4) What strategies do developers and teams use to improve their experience
5) What coping mechanisms do developers resort to

8. Coding example…
Transcript unit: “The founders of the company, when we would go to them for that
criticism, or what we need - they werenʼt very responsive for it. They didnʼt care, or at least
they didnʼt show any sort of empathy about it or any understanding of our situation. They
just said keep working. And so, I think there was always effort to try to improve, but we
started noticing the patterns and gave up trying. We knew that at some point it doesnʼt
matter. We just need to do our job. And that was kind of the reason why we would just
complain to each other because there was no point to reach out anymore because we
tried and it didnʼt work.” [P11]
Preliminary Code: Developers stop speaking up when not heard
Focused Code: Stop speaking up
Core Category: Coping Mechanism

9. Threats to credibility
Validity and reliability in qualitative work mostly has to do with how careful, thorough and honest the researchers
have been during data collection and analysis (Robson, 2002: 176).
Thoroughness and trustworthiness
- interview guideline
- coded each transcript (automatically transcribed/ manually improved)
- replayed video during coding
Interpretive validity
- Paraphrasing and asking clarifying questions
- Involvement from all researchers in axial coding process
- Left an extensive trail (videas, transcripts, notes) open to all researchers
External credibility
- 21 participants
- Saturation reached

10. The DevEX Framework
DX
Factors
Contextual
Characteristics
Developer
Experience
Barriers to
Improvement
Strategies to
Improve
Experience
Coping
Mechanisms

11. The DevEX Framework
DX
Factors
Contextual
Characteristics
Developer
Experience
Barriers to
Improvement
Strategies to
Improve
Experience
Coping
Mechanisms

12. Collaboration
and culture
Development
and release
Product
management
Developer flow
and fulfillment
Important Factors that Impact Developer Experience

13. Important Factors that Impact Developer Experience

14. The DevEX Framework
DX
Factors
Contextual
Characteristics
Developer
Experience
Barriers to
Improvement
Strategies to
Improve
Experience
Coping
Mechanisms

15. Contextual Characteristics:
Psychological safety
Presence of problems
Expectations
Seniority
Company goals
Company maturity
Frequency of problems
“I don’t think that a not perfect
codebase is a reason for somebody
to leave the company. […] Whereas
if you have a toxic culture in your
company, that’s when people think of
leaving a company and actually
really do it.” [P9]
“The weight of these categories
changes drastically depending on how
senior an engineer is. So if you’re a
junior developer, you might actually
really only care about codebase health
and the developer workflow.” [P2]

16. The DevEX Framework
DX
Factors
Contextual
Characteristics
Developer
Experience
Barriers to
Improvement
Strategies to
Improve
Experience
Coping
Mechanisms

17. Barriers to Improvement:
Low prioritization
Inability to quantify problems
Lack of visibility/awareness
Lack of buy-in, ownership
Undefined expectations
Lack of incentives
Unclear process
No visible solutions
Organizational politics
“As long as it’s not visible in
the KPIs, it’s not so important
for the company. [...] It’s hard to
make a case for it.” [P10]

18. The DevEX Framework
DX
Factors
Contextual
Characteristics
Developer
Experience
Barriers to
Improvement
Strategies to
Improve
Experience
Coping
Mechanisms

19. Individual Strategies:
Job crafting
Taking risks
Speaking up
Local improvement
Workarounds
Mimicking success
Being pragmatic
“I started finding ways to improve our
process, or our systems and have a guard rail. I
felt that brought value to the business because it
would save us from rolling back on releases and
reducing any issues [...]” [P11]
“...it’s really about having a shared
understanding, being able to trust each other,
that when I say this is important, my product
manager will say, well, then let’s do it.” [P12]
Team Strategies:
Building bridges
Creating transparency
Convincing others
Making incremental changes
Metrics and measurements
Having a driver
Involving experts

20. The DevEX Framework
DX
Factors
Contextual
Characteristics
Developer
Experience
Barriers to
Improvement
Strategies to
Improve
Experience
Coping
Mechanisms

21. Coping Mechanisms:
Focusing on personal projects
Validating negative experiences
Working overtime
No longer speaking up
Reduced engagement
Gaming the system
Leaving their job
“The quality and overall greatness of the software
we were building was declining, as we were
scaling. And I started to question what was
happening? … I got really cynical about my
experience at [company name] and I started going
into work and just being like, whatever, I’m not
going to care about these things anymore.” [P8]

22. The DevEX Framework
DX
Factors
Contextual
Characteristics
Developer
Experience
Barriers to
Improvement
Strategies to
Improve
Experience
Coping
Mechanisms

23. Plan
Do
Ask

24. https://getdx.com/
abinoda

25. EXPERIENC
E
drives productivity and
performance
DEVELOPER
Being empowered to do my best work, joyfully.
mgreiler margaretstorey abinoda