A survey of 900 developers finds well over two-thirds (69%) said developers are losing eight or more hours of their working week to inefficiencies created by, for example, technical debt, insufficient documentation and flawed build processes.
Conducted by DX, a provider of a software engineering intelligence platform, the survey also noted that only 44% of developers said they believe managers and leaders in their organizations are aware of these issues.
On the plus side, however, a separate survey of 1,250 engineering leaders conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of Atlassian, found more than three quarters (76%) reporting their organizations plan to invest more in developer experience within the next year.
A full 99% of those leaders also acknowledge that the role of the developer has become more complex due to understaffing (48%), expansion of responsibilities (47%), emerging technologies (47%), the need to switch context between tools (43%) and collaboration between teams (43%), the survey finds.
Andrew Boyagi, senior DevOps evangelist at Atlassian, said that while developers and their managers all start with the best of intentions there’s not a lot of clarity when it comes to what’s required to increase developer productivity. In many cases, the amount of joy that developers experience is going to ultimately be more a relevant metric than the number of hours worked, or the volume of code created, he noted.
Reducing the Level of Friction for Developers
Most engineering leaders will see a virtuous cycle emerge if they simply focus on reducing the level of friction developers encounter by, for example, investing in platform engineering as part of a larger effort to both make it simpler to onboard developers to a new project and reduce overall developer churn rates, added Boyagi.
Specific areas that developers identified as the primary causes of wasted time are technical debt (59%), insufficient documentation (41%), build processes (27%), lack of time for deep work (27%), and lack of clear direction (25%).
Nearly two-thirds of developers (63%) said developer experience is important or very important when deciding whether to stay in their current job. A full 86% of leaders said attracting and retaining the best talent will be nearly impossible without improving developer experience, but less than a quarter of developers (23%) are happy with the current levels of investment being made.
AI to Alleviate Concerns
In theory, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might one day alleviate many of these concerns. However, for now, most developers are underwhelmed when asked to what degree AI-based dev tools improve personal productivity. Just under a third (30%) said not at all, while another 32% said these tools slightly improve productivity. Another 38% said they are seeing moderate improvements.
Within the next two years, developers are a little more optimistic, with 26% expecting major improvements, compared to 62% that are expecting slight to moderate improvements.
Regardless of the root cause, it’s clear there are a lot of misalignments between developers and their managers that could be better resolved by simply improving the current feedback loop, said Boyagi.
The challenge and the opportunity now is to find ways to resolve issues in a way that increases. developer satisfaction rates. These are usually influenced by how long it takes for an idea to manifest itself into a working application, that solves an actual problem for an end user.