Tracking Developer Joy to Drive Team Performance - with Sven Peters from Atlassian

I had the pleasure of hosting Sven Peters, Developer Advocate at Atlassian to discuss Developer Experience, a topic that increasingly catches the attention of engineering leaders.

We start the discussion with some mindblowing stats from the recent Developer Experience report, released by Atlassian. According to it, 69% of developers lose eight or more hours per week to inefficiencies. 69%. That’s a full day lost weekly due to the inability to organize work in a way that empowers productivity.

Sven argues that developer joy is the single most important factor directly impacting the team's performance. Increasing it reduces inefficiencies. Or vice-versa. The bottom line is that when traditional metrics fail us, measuring developer joy will likely open perspectives that guide us toward more productive work. So, we talk about concrete actions they’ve taken at Atlassian, how they track developer joy, and what we can learn from the process.

We asked developers, "Where are you losing time?" The top answer was tech debt, followed by insufficient documentation. Then we asked leaders what they see as the main challenge for developers. Their top answer was, "They’re understaffed." It’s not tech debt, not documentation, and not slow build processes. So, they try to fix the problem by adding more people to it.

Here are the main takeaways from this episode:

- 69% of developers lose eight or more hours per week to inefficiencies and less than half of them believe leaders are aware of these issues. On the other hand, nearly 40% of leaders use lines of code and hours worked to measure performance. There’s a huge discrepancy between leadership and engineering that only contributes to the team’s inefficiency.

- Based on Atlassian’s research, Tech Debt is the number one reason developers lose time.

- Leaders often misunderstand the challenges developers face and the first step in resolving them is improving the communication between developers and leaders.

- Developer joy correlates with productivity and satisfaction. Regular surveys can help measure developer satisfaction and continued investment in improving the metrics directly contributes to increased performance.

- Empowering teams to solve their problems increases engagement and creates a culture of continuous improvement and higher work satisfaction.

- Quality assistance, a process where developers own the quality with a handful of QA experts to assist them, helps developers take responsibility for their code and improve the general team performance.

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