Why DX (Developer Experience) is the next frontier in Atlassian ecosystem

[#1]

Developer Experience (DX) is no longer a “nice to have”,  in large organisations it’s one of the fastest levers you have for productivity, quality and retention.

What we actually mean by DX

Developer Experience is the sum of how developers feel and perform when dealing with your tools, processes and platform,  from IDE and repo to CI/CD, documentation and governance.

When DX is bad, developers spend their days fighting friction instead of shipping value.

Why DX is now a board-level topic

1. The cost of friction explodes with scale

• 69% of developers lose 8+ hours every week to inefficient tools and processes.
  
  

• Clunky tech alone is costing teams up to 20 working days per developer per year.
  
  

In a team of 500+ engineers, that’s millions in lost capacity – every year.

2. Better DX measurably moves the needle

A large enterprise that invested in DX reported:

• +10–20% developer productivity

• –20% critical incidents

• –15–20% security vulnerabilities 

This is not about “developer happiness” as a soft metric – it’s about throughput, risk and resilience.

3. Talent chooses (and leaves) based on DX
Studies consistently link strong DX with higher satisfaction, retention and the ability to attract top engineers, especially in competitive tech hubs.

In other words: if your toolchain feels like 2012, your best people won’t stay until 2030.

4. Complexity and compliance require sane workflows

Large organisations juggle dozens of tools, regulatory requirements and multi-team codebases. Developers routinely deal with 10–14 tools in their daily flow; poor integration and documentation directly slow them down.

Good DX reduces cognitive load and bakes quality, security and compliance into the everyday workflow instead of adding yet another checklist on top.

What “good DX” looks like in practice

This is exactly the space we work in with our Atlassian apps (now as part of Communardo Products):

• Frictionless, high-signal code reviews

  • Code Review Assistant for Bitbucket and Include Code Quality for Bitbucket/Bamboo surface static analysis, test coverage and security findings directly in pull requests , plus AI support for review comments and PR descriptions.

  • Result: fewer context switches, faster reviews, and better decisions at the point where they matter.
    
    

• Docs where developers actually work

  • Include from Bitbucket/ GitHub/ GitLab to Confluence and Jupyter Viewer for Confluence bring code, notebooks and technical docs into one place, so engineers don’t lose time hunting for “the latest version”.
    
    

TL;DR for large organisations

If you care about:

• Shipping faster

• Reducing incidents and vulnerabilities

• Keeping (and attracting) great engineers

…then you already care about Developer Experience – whether you call it that or not.

A practical place to start is to ask:

“Where do our developers lose the most time: code reviews, documentation, or compliance?”

That’s where DX improvements – and tools like ours in the Atlassian ecosystem – can give you an immediate, measurable win.