Atlassian details developer 'happiness' quotient, workflows should work better
Atlassian CTO Rajeev Rajan kicked off his firm’s developer experience analysis this year by saying that software development teams are, of course, dealing with more complexity than ever.
Why is this so?
Much of it comes down to teams who have moved from monoliths to microservices, seen an explosion in APIs, started to explore generative AI tools and increasingly now work in a distributed environment.
Developers are being asked to manage everything from security vulnerabilities to cloud configuration, which leaves little time for writing code says Rajan.
Because we know that maximising productivity is key, we need to work smarter, but software application developer productivity is notoriously difficult to quantify.
“As the saying goes, you can’t improve what you can’t measure,” said Rajan.
Meanwhile, there’s a significant body of research showing that happy workers are productive workers. So instead of worrying about what makes developers more efficient, what if we think about what makes them happy?”
The company surveyed 2,100+ developers and managers across a range of industries to get a look at what keeps work flowing smoothly vs. what introduces friction, and how they feel about their work environments in the age of microservices and AI.
Developer happiness?
Developers and leaders know developer experience is critical to attracting and retaining talent. So then, 86% of leaders believe attracting and retaining the best developer talent will be almost impossible without improving the developer experience.
Out in the real world, there are mismatches between leader attitudes and what developers actually experience i.e. less than half of developers think their organisation prioritises developer experience.
Atlassian says that developer experience focuses on the ‘lived experience’ of developers and the points of friction they encounter in their everyday work.
But developer productivity isn’t well understood or enabled with 69% of developers lose 8 hours or more of their working week to inefficiencies. Less than half of developers (44%) believe leaders are aware of these issues.
“The last few years may have seen a lot of interest in developer productivity, but that doesn’t mean organisations are enabling their developers to be as productive as possible. In our survey, 69% of developers say they’re losing 8 hours or more a week to inefficiencies in their role,” said the company, in a press statement.
Looking at the state of the nation in this space, Atlassian suggests that hiring top talent only to have them blocked by organisational impediments is pointless and expensive. For an organisation with 500 developers, losing 8 hours per week costs roughly £6 million over the course of a year.
“With such significant losses on the line, it’s essential to understand the main friction points in the daily lives of software developers. Our study found that the top contributors are technical debt, along with a lack of documentation, processes, focus time and direction,” noted the team.
Finally, here, Atlassian suggests that most leaders admit the metrics they track are ineffective for measuring developer productivity. Its survey of engineering leaders shows the most commonly used metrics are the amount of code written, the number of story points completed and hours worked.
But more than half of the engineering leaders using these metrics find them ineffective as a measure of developer productivity.
There has to be a better way… would Atlassian recommend a workflow automation management platform solution do you think?
