Forrester Trends Report: Understand developer experience to improve business outcomes
Read the Forrester Trends Report to discover how to:
- Identify the five levers of developer experience. There are five key levers that can influence your developer experience, and managing these levers can make or break your developer retention over time.
- Improve developer experience. Providing adequate tech and software, modern software architecture, and helpful processes can go a long way toward improving developers' daily work.
- Increase developer productivity. Friction points frustrate developers and can curb productivity. Embrace a culture of resilience, give developers autonomy, and provide opportunities for advancement.
Forrester Trends Report: Understand developer experience to improve business outcomes
About the report
Report findings
Strong organizations have happy and productive developers. The report explores critical insights, including:
- Attracting and keeping experienced developers is hard. Even if you can afford to compete on salary, developers won’t stay at companies or jobs they don’t like.
- Losing knowledge is painful. When experienced developers leave your organization, they take critical institutional knowledge, valuable insights, expertise, and a deep understanding of development projects with them.
- Forrester has identified 5 areas that impact developer experience directly. Improvements to any of them can increase developer productivity and retention.
A poor developer experience gives rise to quantifiable losses. Forrester has identified five levers that affect developer experience. Development experience professionals, software development team leaders, development experience product vendors, and developers can use these levers to improve productivity, increase retention, reduce delays, and build team morale. Read this report to learn what development experience is, what those levers are, and how you can improve developer experience at your organization.
About the report
Recommendations
Build an effective game plan to keep your developers happy and productive. Strategies include:
- Keep developers in flow. Developers are most productive at solving problems when they have time to work on them without interruption. Encourage a culture that interrupts only for critical issues, with the understanding that disruption has a cost.
- Reduce human error through automation. Use a test framework and require tests to pass before developers can check code in. Require tests for each fixed defect to prevent regressions. Think about other opportunities to automate as well.
- Make knowledge sharing. Real-time access to answers can help improve the developer experience by reducing interruptions between developers and providing knowledge to newly onboarded staff.
Forrester Trends Report: Understand developer experience to improve business outcomes, Forrester Research, Inc., June 21, 2023.