Improving the Developer Experience with the Team Playbook
Many companies are talking about improving the developer experience these days. There are a lot of opinions out there on whether you can measure developer experience or not. For Atlassian, it means identifying teams' pain points in software development and trying to remove them.
We care about teams. Each team is unique and different, and so are their developer experience challenges. One team might have a problem delivering decent code quality, whereas another team might struggle with too much time waiting for builds to be completed or for other teams to move a task forward. That’s why a team should improve their developer experience individually.
At Atlassian, we’ve developed two rituals that help our engineers identify DevEx pain points and develop initiatives to improve. They act more as conversation starters for the individual team rather than trying to optimize numbers.
We’re happy to announce that we’ll release these two rituals as brand-new plays to the Atlassian Team Playbook. We have many plays that help developer teams improve the way they work, but these two plays focus 100% on developer experience.
CheckOps
The CheckOps Play is a weekly practice that guides DevOps teams as they review operational metrics, track notable events, and form actionable goals.
You start by defining your goals in a measurable way so you know whether you've met them. For example, if your team is tired of being woken up at odd hours of the night with alerts and incidents they can't do anything about, set a goal for minimizing the number of incidents and un-actionable alerts.
In a weekly meeting, your team will review those metrics, discuss them, and agree on actions to make improvements. The discussion must take place because there can be good reasons why a number might be pointing in the wrong direction. For example, your deployment frequency might decrease if you have a larger code refactoring. There’s no reason to take action because you know it’ll improve once you’re done with the refactoring.
The CheckOps play helps teams to understand operational metrics better, talk about them as a team, and improve the developer experience over time.
Developer Experience Survey
Only some things can be measured in numbers. Developers might not feel very productive because of the tools they’re using, the processes that slow them down, or the time they’re waiting on other teams to get a task done. Helping teams to identify and name those pain points is the goal of the DevEx Survey play.
As a team, you identify vital signs that help uncover your developer experience's pain points. Vital signs are data points that act as team health and performance indicators. Much like your body’s vital signs, they can quickly identify problems in the system.
Next, you’ll run a survey asking two questions for each vital sign: one about the importance of the vital sign to the developer and one about how satisfied the developer is with their team’s current ability to deliver on the vital sign. The results will be represented as an opportunity score for each vital sign, indicating whether it needs improvement. The team discusses the survey results, identifies the top three most pressing opportunity areas, and brainstorms solutions.
The most helpful developer experience surveys are organization-specific. We’ve included an Atlassian-specific survey into the play to give you a better start. Our survey may work for your team as-is, but we encourage you to adapt the survey to your team and organization as needed.
Improve the developer experience
None of the two plays actively improve your developer experience. Hopefully, the teams' actions will lead to more developer satisfaction. The plays are designed to identify pain points that act as a discussion starter for the team. Often, team members are aware of their developer experience challenges but are not openly discussing them with the team or taking action. The CheckOps and DevEx survey play is designed to change that.
Let us know what you think in the comments. How are you improving your developer experience? Are you already using metrics and surveys? What do you think about the two DevEx plays?
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Sven Peters
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