January 8, 2025

What is Developer Experience and Why Does it Matter?

Developer Productivity

“Happier developers write better code.” It’s a trope but also a core truth. The more fulfilled your developers are, the more productive they’ll be, and in turn, the greater impact their efforts will have on your business.

Developer experience is clearly important, but it can be tricky to implement in a way that developers will actually like. Read on for a tutorial on what influences developer experience, why developer experience matters in your business, and steps to increase developer productivity, including:

What is Developer Experience?
Where Does a Developer’s Time Go?
What Are the Biggest Obstacles to Developer Productivity?
What Influences Developer Experience
Take Steps to Improve Developer Experience
Final Thoughts

What is Developer Experience?

Developer experience (DX) focuses on points of friction in developers' workflow and the level of satisfaction they derive from their jobs.

Developer experience is easier to say, but much harder to do in a way that developers will actually like. Ultimately, small tweaks to processes, offering more choice for an individual’s development environment, and limiting meetings can increase job satisfaction and developer productivity.

More and more of the power is going to developers to bring in processes, tools, etc. that they learn about from peers or at conferences. A crucial component of developer experience is constant input and iteration from your development team.

Where Does a Developer’s Time Go?

Most developers would prefer to spend the majority of their day coding, but that’s rarely the case. Instead, large portions of developers’ workdays are lost to attending meetings, completing processes, and waiting for redeploys.

Whether your biggest limiter is the frequency of redeploys or the amount of time each redeploy takes, there’s a solution: JRebel. See how much time your team could save during a 14-day free trial.
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What Are the Biggest Obstacles to Developer Productivity?

According to the 2024 Java Developer Productivity Report, 29% of developers say that too many tasks is their biggest obstacle to Java development productivity. That’s followed by communication issues between teams (26%), redeploy times (22%), and mismanaged timelines (20%).

🔎 Dig into more stats like these in the 2024 Java Developer Productivity Report.

Too many tasks can go hand in hand with not enough time to focus, whether that’s from too many projects in the queue, concurrent tasks, working with too many teams, or some other reason. Those aforementioned reasons can also contribute to communication issues between teams, whether they’re down the hall from one another or across the globe.

Redeploy times can also be a huge drain to productivity, especially when they’re 10 minutes or more (as is often the case with SAP Cloud Commerce instances). But the frequency of redeploys and the break in development flow they cause can also pose a barrier to productivity. The 2024 Java Developer Productivity Report found that 45% of respondents have redeploy times of 3 minutes or less per application, but each one of those redeploys can cause disruption to development workflow.

Mismanaged timelines can indicate the project management isn’t up to snuff, or that too many priorities are being added to established projects. Each of these barriers can be overcome by focusing on the fundamentals of developer experience.

What Influences Developer Experience

Developer experience focuses on points of friction. Strategies to improve developer experience commonly focus on three key areas: development environment, development overhead, and developer tools.

Development Environment

Letting developers have some choice, especially when it comes to code editors and IDEs, can make a big difference for developer experience. There’s a large variety of personal preference, and letting developers pick likely won’t have a big impact on your business.

Developer Overhead

The amount of ancillary tasks a developer has to complete can affect how much time they have to code each day. Development overhead tasks like emails, meetings, and establishing processes can account for 10-80% of a developer’s workday.

Developer Tools

Consider giving developers a budget for tools that they can spend on tools that they like, and don’t force developers to use tools that they don’t like. Developer tools might seem like a big expense, but it can be a cheap investment toward improving developer morale, job satisfaction, and productivity.

Take Steps to Improve Developer Experience

Job satisfaction is a key component of developer experience, but it’s not the only factor. If developers like where they work, they’ll bring new talent to your organization. Steps to improve developer experience can increase employee retention rates. Simply put, it’s easier to keep key talent if they’re happy.

Some simple steps to improve developer experience include:

Use AI to automate tedious and time-consuming coding processes

Carefully evaluate whether meetings are truly necessary

Let developers have as much say as possible in their personal development environments
Easing high-toil tasks like provisioning, configuring, and recycling environments by letting developers do it themselves with self-service automation

Give developers a budget to invest and tools and frameworks they like

Use enterprise tools to take overhead tasks off of your developers

Want more tips and tricks on improving developer experience by optimizing Java development environments? Watch this recorded webinar with CTO Rod Cope.
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Final Thoughts

Looking for more ways to improve developer experience for your Java development team? Try JRebel. By eliminating redeploys your development team can write better code, faster.

See how much time you can save during your 14-day free trial of JRebel.
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