How to Improve the Developer Journey
With an increase in the development of software applications and remote work culture, there has also been an increase in the workload on the developers.
According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020, more than 75% of developers work overtime and 25% of them work overtime 1–2 days or more a week. This creates a hectic schedule, resulting in a stressful environment that often harms the wellbeing of the developers and the pace of their software development in the long run. This article explains the developer’s journey and various ways to improve it.
What is the Developer Journey?
A developer’s journey can be defined as the path the developer follows while developing a software product. During the development phase, a developer often follows different stages of discovery, evaluation, learning, building, and scaling of the product, and thus, the level of interactions of the developer with the product increases as they move from one stage to the next.
This also increases the complexity that the developer faces as they move from one stage to another, hence, it becomes necessary for organizations to focus on the developer experience so that the developers can effectively focus on software development without getting distracted.
Developer experience can be considered as the atmosphere in which the developer can effectively contribute toward the success of a software product by bringing out their best efforts. Most organizations focus on improving their developer’s experiences by leveraging their skill to enhance their productivity and making them feel as if they are part of the organization and working towards the common goal of the success of the company.
The developer’s journey from the initial stage of discovery to the final stage of scaling can be improved in many different ways. Some of the methods are explained in this article.
Ways to Improve Developer Journey
The developer journey is a complex and multi-step process and a developer has to face many different types of problems that cannot be avoided. So, optimizing these problems from the very start of the project helps to smoothly process all the upcoming problems that also make the developer’s life easy.
The most basic stages that a developer follows while working on a project are discovery, ideation, planning and designing, development, deployment, and continuous customer feedback. These stages can be efficiently managed for improving the developer’s productivity and overall experience in the following ways:
Developer Portals
While working on the project a developer interacts with various kinds of things like APIs, SDKs, documentation, different tools, and plugins. The developer has to search for all these resources while working on the product, which hampers their ongoing development work.
Having access to a developer portal saves their time and the extra effort it take to search for the resources since a developer portal provides all the required technical information on a single platform for everyone in the team. Thus, having a well-maintained developer portal eases the developer’s work and improves their efficiency.
Setting Up Installation Teams
The initial step in every project after the ideation and designing phase is setting up the right environment for the project, installing all the software, and configuring them according to the system. But most developers often find this step difficult because of the difference in the organization’s hardware and software systems. These problems can be solved by having a proper installation team in the organization that can assist the developers every time they face any issue regarding the system installation or configuration.
Having a specific team for managing all the issues regarding the system software and making all the resources available before time lets developers concentrate on the logic and working of the project rather than struggling on setting up the working environment.
Debugging Tools
According to a DevOps.com survey, 32% of developers spend about 10 hours and nearly 16% of developers spend about 15 hours per week fixing bugs present in the project instead of working on a new feature.
Developers often feel frustrated while solving errors or finding bugs, which is the most likely source of developer burnout. So, having automation tools to detect errors or bugs as soon as they are introduced into the project can help developers fix them quickly and get back to writing the actual code of the project.
Small Feedback Loops
The feedback loop is the process of validating and getting feedback on the software development process. Having short feedback cycles is an important aspect of the Agile methodology that lets developers know the customer preferences at an early age of development.
Similarly, getting feedback regarding the progress of the project from everyone in the team allows developers to fix the problem early and lets them know if they are following the right path and performing the tasks correctly. This allows them to make any modifications in the early stages of development, which is much easier than when it has to be done in the later stages.
Team Collaboration
For the success of any project, effective team collaboration plays a vital role. If everyone in the team is not following the same path, there is a chance that they develop the wrong product or are unable to meet deadlines or the budget. This forces the developer to work overtime to meet the deadlines. Effective communication between team members can accelerate the development pace, allowing them to meet their deadlines while working efficiently, saving time and effort.
Conclusion
For the success of any product or organization, it is necessary that their development teams have a positive, friendly, and comfortable environment that helps them focus on the product and overcome problems and deadlines with the most effective solution. The abovementioned ways will help organizations create such an experience for their developers, which will increase their efficiency as well as the success rate of their projects.
