5 Reasons to Prioritize a Positive Developer Experience
5 Reasons to Prioritize a Positive Developer Experience
Is building and maintaining an internal development platform negatively impacting developer happiness and retention? If your innovative developers are burdened with the administrative tasks of maintaining a development platform, your company may have unhappy developers. And unhappy developers can really negatively impact product productivity.
When unhappy cloud app developers leave the organization because of a negative developer experience, the cost can be significant — both in direct and indirect costs. Here's a double whammy: When developers go, it can demoralize the rest of the team. This exodus can lead to decreased engagement, lower productivity, and increased turnover as other team members seek new opportunities.
Now here's a triple whammy: if you build your development platform and that development team leaves, they'll take their knowledge of the development platform's systems tech with them. This departure of information can lead to knowledge gaps and potentially costly mistakes as new team members learn the ropes of this new system. So now you're down developers and a development platform.
Ugh!
Retaining talented developers
Developers in general dislike organizational red tape, emails, meetings, and resource allocation, which hinder their productivity. Hence, a great developer experience (DX) can boost performance and productivity. Companies that prioritize DX can gain improvements in areas, such as talent retention and attraction, productivity, consistency, quality, security, compliance, and speed.
By providing a user-friendly platform, reducing time wastage, standardizing tooling, embedding security and compliance, and automating production, organizations can increase developers' job satisfaction, decrease costs, enhance product quality, meet compliance standards, and achieve faster deployment times. Furthermore, such investments in DX can result in high returns on investment, making them worth the effort.
Pro Tip: ask how happy your developers are with your existing in-house development platform. Many companies discover that buying a development platform increases a positive developer experience and accelerates productivity. So, what are the benefits of prioritizing a positive developer experience? Here are five things to consider:
- Attracting and retaining top talent. Keeping developers happy is a key benefit of prioritizing DX in organizations. The best engineers in the industry seek out companies with strong tech culture, high employee satisfaction, and a reputation for excellence. In such organizations, developers are able to focus on their core skills and build great software with the latest tools, while minimizing bureaucracy and unproductive work.
- Increase productivity and reduce costs. By streamlining processes and reducing the time spent on mundane tasks like searching for resources and handling administrative work, developers can bring customer solutions from idea to code in a matter of minutes, rather than months. This targeted investment in a positive developer experience (DX) can produce a high return on investment.
- Improved product quality. By standardizing and productizing the entire tool stack for developers can contribute to better developer experience (DX), as well as improve the overall quality of digital products. By building with high-quality components and tools, developers can more easily create products that meet customer needs and are free from errors or glitches. Additionally, having easy-to-find and integrated tooling allows developers to focus on what truly matters, rather than spending time figuring out how to use unfamiliar tools.
- Better security makes developers more secure. By incorporating security testing as part of the enterprise-wide continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline or embedding default compliance policies in all cloud environments, compliance is established from the outset, reducing the team's efforts on routine work and meeting the organization's audit, security, and risk requirements.
- Reduce scrap and rework. Early feedback on quality checks, such as testing, code quality, and controls, reducing handovers and coordination between teams, and full automation of the production process can eliminate rework and allow developers to cover more ground quickly. Consequently, organizations can achieve multiple deployments a day, rather than waiting weeks or months between deployments. Thus, prioritizing developer experience can lead to more efficient and effective development processes, ensuring the organization's success.
Why outsourcing software development fosters a great developer experience
Building a development platform can provide – in some isolated cases - benefits, but it's essential to consider the opportunity costs that come with it. You might miss out on other projects or initiatives with a higher ROI or limit your flexibility and scalability. Therefore, it's crucial to carefully weigh the potential benefits and costs and make an informed decision.
Buying a cloud development platform can offer several benefits compared to building one in-house. First, it can save the company significant time and resources, allowing them to get to market faster. With a pre-built platform, the company can immediately start using the platform rather than spending time and resources developing one from scratch. Developers want to innovate, they don’t want to delegate and administrate.
The building of a platform keeps them from doing what they love: building killer applications. Buying can give the company a competitive advantage by allowing developers to bring new products and services to market quickly and efficiently. That’s a recipe for a happy developer.
