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Developer productivity is of paramount importance to Atlassian.
The Australian technology company has approximately 5,000 engineers worldwide and a number of globally competitive workhorse software products. Its success depends on attracting developers and delivering quality products.
However, Atlassian believes that measuring developer productivity is ineffective. Instead, the company prefers to align with a broader initiative to improve the developer experience, known as “Developer Happiness.” The idea is simple: happy developers are ultimately more productive.
Atlassian’s Problem with Measuring Developer Productivity
Atlassian believes that productivity is difficult to measure and can be counterproductive.
In a blog postAndrew Boyagi, DevOps evangelist at Atlassian, said he understands why enterprises want to measure developer productivity. He explained that as IT and business leaders face pressure to launch digital products or features or manage digital transformation, these companies want to demonstrate return on investment in people and technology.
But developer productivity is difficult to measure, he said. Popular metrics in the past and present include lines of code generated, tasks moved to the done column, story points estimated in a sprint, or DORA metrics such as software deployment frequency and cycle time.
DevOps Advocate at Atlassian Sven Peters says These metrics don’t actually measure productivity. Metrics like lines of code or deployment frequency can be manipulated, story points are just estimates, and none of them measure positive outcomes for customers, he said.
Productivity measures are also problematic given that development roles now involve more than just coding and releasing new features. Peters said a developer’s cognitive load now includes more time running and building software.
Developer Experience: A New Way to Be More Productive?
There is a growing focus on how developer experience affects productivity. DevEx focuses on creating the right environment for efficient work through better tools and technologies, de-emphasizing DevOps’ emphasis on productivity tools and frameworks.
Deloitte selected DevEx Top technology trends for 2024The company said today’s developers are “in high demand but hampered by productivity challenges such as configuration, tool integration, and debugging” that hinder activities and capabilities that add value to their business.
Three Elements of Great Developer Experience
Deloitte analysis There are three key elements to discovering a good DevEx proposal:
- Platforms and Tools: A smaller number of better, standardized platforms and tools make developers’ lives easier and more enjoyable. State of Developer Experience Survey Found that too many tools were used, increasing context switching and slowing down onboarding.
- Working methods and processes: Great DevEx requires “clear, continuous processes” so that developers can complete tasks in a “streamlined” way while avoiding the friction that comes from disjointed systems or poor governance. This includes advanced team workflow management and DevSecOps.
- Talent experience: Developers work best when they are part of a community and culture that is “fun, productive, and diverse”; where they are constantly learning; and when they have the opportunity for mobility and career growth through ongoing advancement and development opportunities.
Atlassian’s approach to productivity: maximizing “developer joy”
Atlassian believes that developers who are happy and satisfied with their work are also more likely to be productive. This means that instead of wasting time and resources measuring productivity, it is better to spend energy on investing and maximizing what we call “developer happiness.”
Atlassian says that developer happiness comes from many factors, but mainly includes two aspects:
- Developer Experience: Atlassian summarizes DevEx as how engineers feel about the tools, frameworks, and platforms they use to create software.
- Engineering Culture: Atlassian defines engineering culture as “how work gets done.” It includes elements such as organizational values, norms, and decision-making.
Atlassian’s Peters further delves into what makes Atlassian developers happy, including:
- Development Quality: Developers will enjoy their work more if they focus on high-quality code.
- Development progress: It’s satisfying for developers to be able to make rapid progress without hindrance.
- Development value: Joy and pride come from creating value and impacting our clients’ business.
What does “developer joy” look like?
Atlassian’s focus on creating and measuring developer happiness has resulted in countless improvements across different product teams. Outlined in Peters’s speechwhich includes initiatives from Atlassian’s JIRA, Confluence, and Trello product teams.
Gila
Their JIRA team developed a new set of code review guidelines to make it easier for developers to receive feedback and improve their code. The guidelines include “assuming the developer’s ability” and providing constructive, reasonable feedback.
JIRA product and development teams have also improved collaboration to avoid rework. Now all team members are involved to varying degrees in every stage of the lifecycle – from the product “miracle” stage to the development and customer “impact” stage.
confluence
Atlassian’s Confluence team developed an internal tool for detecting “flaky” code tests that block pull requests from being processed. After identifying flaky tests, the tool flags them for review via an automated Slack message so that developers aren’t distracted by time-consuming debugging issues.
Another team reduced the time it took to process pull requests, from 3 days to 1.2 days to merge code into the master branch. They did this by sending automated reminders to team members in the morning before they started their work to review pull requests.
Trello
The Trello team devised a way to integrate quality assurance into their workflow. They created a QA Kick-Off where the QA assistant notifies the developer of the exploratory testing they will be doing. This allows the developer to take primary responsibility for QA with the support of the QA assistant.
How IT leaders can improve their teams’ development enjoyment
Ask developers for suggestions
Atlassian made it clear that businesses, including tech companies, should seek input from developers if they are serious about improving the developer experience. Atlassian said developers are very willing to provide feedback on issues they encounter to improve their enjoyment at work.
Atlassian offers free Developer Experience Survey Teams can set up and run this survey digitally or onsite to measure their developer experience. The survey helps get feedback on elements such as “Sustainable Delivery Velocity”, “Wait Times”, “Execution Independence”, etc.
Make time for happiness
Atlassian decided to free up 10% of developer time to find ways to increase “developer fun” in the business. This means that Atlassian developers will spend about 55% of their time “changing the business” by developing products and features for customers, 35% of their time “keeping the lights on” through maintenance-style work, and 10% of their time on developer fun.
Treat each company and team differently
Peters advises DevOps leaders to think of each company and team as having a unique path to developer happiness. Copying another company or team’s approach probably won’t work, he said. Instead, work on driving happiness within your team’s unique tools and processes.
Adding context to productivity metrics
Organizations should not rely solely on the limited information provided by productivity metrics such as deployment frequency. Instead, they should seek to add more comprehensive context to these metrics and add new metrics that influence productivity, such as the fun of the development team.
Developer happiness could be the future of tech talent
For developers, finding a tech workplace that values happiness over productivity seems like a dream. In fact, for many developers around the world Working at a large tech companyit’s hard enough to ensure happiness, let alone cultivate true joy at work.
Atlassian Australia may have figured something out, though. As Boyagi notes in his Atlassian blog post, companies that focus on DevEx may have an edge over their competitors, including in attracting top talent. “I know what type of company I’d rather work for,” Boyoagi writes.
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