Get the data you need to build a better developer experience: DX 360 Survey + Compass integration

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Improving developer experience starts with understanding your developers. Nobody has a better sense of what developers need or their pain points than them. You can learn from your developers in one-on-ones, but that doesn’t indicate how widespread their problems are across your teams.

We’ve partnered with DX, a leading developer insights platform, to bring developer experience surveys into Compass. Leaders can use DX to understand what’s causing developers friction and clearly identify what’s impacting their productivity and satisfaction. For platform and developer productivity leaders, these insights can also be useful for quantifying the impact of their work.

DX and Compass integrate to shed light on building a better developer experience

Developer experience is constantly evolving, so it’s critical you have the right internal developer platform (IDP) to solve the problems slowing down your teams. DX’s DevEx 360 surveys are designed by the researchers behind DORA and SPACE metrics and can be used to enrich your IDP experience in Compass.

With these surveys, you can:

• Identify the top opportunities to improve developer job satisfaction.
• Pinpoint the biggest factors slowing down your software development teams.
• Empower every team to improve with individualized insights and recommendations.

And all directly within Compass.

The importance of qualitative and quantitative metrics for developer experience

Qualitative metrics and quantitative metrics are complementary approaches to measuring developer experience. Qualitative metrics (from surveys) provide a holistic view of job satisfaction that includes both subjective and objective measurements. Quantitative metrics (from systems) provide an objective view of development activity based on data from your engineering systems.

Ultimately, it’s through the combination of both methods that organizations can gain maximum visibility into the developer experience.

To use them together, DX’s research team recommends starting with qualitative metrics (via surveys) to establish baselines and determine where to focus. Then, follow with quantitative metrics to help drill deeper into specific areas.

Examples:

• You might learn from the survey that developers are unsatisfied with the deployment process. You can then look at Merge to Deploy, a metric calculating the time between a code change being merged and deployed, and see that it’s taking developers more than a day to release approved changes.
• Survey results might show developers are frustrated with the code review process. You ask developers for additional feedback on their frustration and learn that some PRs can take more than 24 hours to be reviewed. You then look at the median, P75, and P90 Time in Review (quantitative metrics), which measure how long a code change is waiting on review across all of its individual review cycles. You confirm that about 20% of developers’ PRs take over 24 hours to review.

With DX’s DevEx 360 surveys in Compass, you get the qualitative data you need from your developers to help you identify the opportunities for your teams and establish baselines quickly and accurately.

How to add your quantitative metrics to Compass

The Compass scorecards provide guidance to improve the practices on your teams. With scorecards, you have a framework to ensure your teams follow best practices and show any areas for improvement.

Your Compass site comes with two built-in scorecards that are automatically applied to your components: The components readiness scorecard and the health scorecard. The health scorecard helps your team measure owner team, repository, pull request cycle time, and deployment frequency.

You can create custom scorecards in seconds to monitor specific metrics on your teams via the Health tab.

Learn more here

How to set up your DX integration for qualitative metrics

To install and use DX in Compass, go to the Apps tab. After installation, you’ll see DX in your Apps.

When you click into the app, you’ll get a high-level data dashboard from the DX 360 Surveys directly in Compass. This summary view is unique to the Compass + DX integration, enriching your IDP experience.

You can then toggle between data views, from trends to snapshots, to understand the developer experience on your teams. What’s working for your developers? What isn’t? Where should you invest next?

🌟 Learn more about this integration and how you can leverage developer portals to improve developer experience at our LinkedIn Live event! Join Andrew Boyagi (Atlassian) and Abi Noda (DX) on April 24, 2024, at 12:00 p.m. PT right here.

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[Jack Ukleja]

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