Developer experience (DevEx) resource hub
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Why is it worth thinking about developer experience?
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Why is it worth thinking about developer experience?
Matt Saunders
Published on 19 January 2026
8 min read
Matt Saunders
Published on 19 January 2026
8 min read
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A different perspective on software development
Increasing the pace of innovation
Getting up-and-running
Empowering developers to move faster
DevEx FAQs
Working like a start-up
Matt Saunders of The Adaptavist Group explains how DevEx drives productivity, innovation, and a virtuous cycle for software development.
Software has become increasingly pivotal to the efficiency and competitiveness of most organisations over the past 20 years. Moreover, the demands continue to rise. What is the most effective way to manage the software development process to ensure it can keep pace? In recent years, the DevOps movement has sought to unify software development and IT operations to increase speed, quality and reliability. Now, it's time to examine the process from the developers' perspective to make further gains.
Depending on what you do for a living, it might surprise you to learn that software developers typically spend just a fraction of their time writing code. Why? Because their role in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) involves solving problems with code. From discussing and evaluating requirements, exploring options and finding solutions to spinning up development environments and cloud infrastructure, writing experiments and tests, deploying and optimising the software, actually writing code is only part of what they do. They often spend more time on what seems to be unproductive work because many activities take them away from it. That is what Developer Experience (or DevEx) is concerned with.
At The Adaptavist Group, we've long focused on the experience and productivity of software developers. Working alongside partners such as Atlassian and GitLab, we've provided the tools, platforms, and processes that help developers work more effectively. Agile development and the DevOps movement (or mindset) have focused us on improving the accuracy, speed, and robustness of software development, enabling teams to deliver the right features rapidly and then support and maintain the service. As release and deployment processes become more efficient, developers must keep pace, but this requires some fundamental changes.
A different perspective on software development
DevEx has come into focus over the last two to three years, examining the process through a different lens. DevOps observes the SDLC as a whole, removing silos between development and operations to smooth the transition between the two, reducing deployment time and increasing manageability. Where DevOps focuses on the interaction between teams and the way software moves through the development cycle, DevEx examines the process from the perspective of developers. Why? Because it seeks to further optimise the SDLC by providing the environment, tools and information that developers need to be effective. Often, it involves removing blockers, bottlenecks and impediments that take them away from doing the most critical work.
The more organisations can direct developers' time, thinking, and energy towards delivering competitive value, the faster and smarter their output will be. It might mean moving from having to request that a development environment is 'spun up' to having access to a self-service tool, allowing them to do it themselves via automation. It could be minor changes to processes, practices or culture that surface the data or answers they need to make better decisions.
Increasing the pace of innovation
DevEx focuses on practices, tools, and culture around development, enabling the pace of innovation to increase. It might involve emphasising the benefits of being good 'citizens' within the process – documenting code and thought processes clearly and consistently so they can be understood by others (now and in the future). It's often changes that aren't obvious from other places in the organisation and may involve influencing the behaviour of developers themselves.
At the heart of many DevEx initiatives is the creation – and curation – of an internal developer platform (IDP). The IDP is a self-service resource that provides developers with access to the information, tools, and services they need to initiate a development project and make progress quickly. It de-silos and translates the organisation for the benefit of developer productivity.
Getting up-and-running
Imagine you've just started a new job. You want to be up and running quickly. However, if you don't have the necessary tools, don't understand the teams and departments around you, and don't know where to turn for answers, you can't be productive. That's how it can feel as a developer tasked with building a feature that interacts with different teams or data sources within the organisation. When initiating a project, additional onboarding requirements apply. Does the development team have access to a ticket queue, a Git repository, a continuous integration pipeline, and the necessary infrastructure to develop on, for example? The IDP is at the heart of developer experience, empowering them to be self-sufficient and removing blockers to action.
One key principle of the IDP is that it doesn't attempt to make every developer, team or department work in the same way. Instead, it surfaces and encodes the different practices and processes within the organisation, so they're visible, understandable and usable. It's also a library of what developers need, set up in such a way that makes it easy to deploy with the organisation's particular processes or standards embedded into it. For example, perhaps they can deploy a development environment with one click, but adding the organisation's 'best practice' security posture into it elevates the Dev Ex posture significantly. An IDP can also expose API endpoints and metrics for other services that the developer needs to interact with. Being able to see these clearly and consistently allows the developer to work autonomously and safely.
Empowering developers to move faster
Once a developer is onboarded and empowered with access to the necessary tools and resources, the focus is on enabling them to be productive – i.e., able to spend time on the things that create better outcomes. Organisations are often structured to optimise the operation of each business function with technology and process decisions that reflect that. However, developers usually need to work across these silos. That can be a source of friction and delay when accessing, understanding and interacting with systems, processes and data. To help developers be as productive as possible, we typically focus on surfacing those systems, processes and data, anticipating that they will need to work with them, and look to map the value streams needed to actually deliver. The IDP becomes the go-to resource for effectively translating between different teams and departments, reducing friction and fostering mutual benefits.
DevEx FAQs
How quickly can you go from idea to the first line of code?
This is a simple measure, but it is perhaps the most important one in measuring friction in the developer experience. Much of the delay and frustration stems from the initial blockers to productivity, and this metric is easily measured.
How quickly can you safely integrate new features into production?
A metric from DORA, this end-to-end measure varies based on the scope of the features being delivered, but it serves as a decent benchmark for measuring progress.
How much time do developers spend collaborating, exploring, thinking and inventing?
Harder to measure, but this is a key way to understand how well-aligned the developer experience is with value creation.
Is staff turnover among developers reducing?
Competition for talent is fierce, and the cost of replacing team members is high. Developers who can engage with their work without frustration or obstructions tend to have higher job satisfaction.
How much time do developers spend interacting with (internal or external) customers?
I would argue that when developers spend more time engaging with customers and understanding their requirements and problems, they gain a better understanding of the requirements.
Working like a start-up
Writing code is a creative activity. It involves looking for solutions, experimenting and trying things. It's not a task that we can simply 'do faster'. However, we tend to move faster and innovate better when we feel safe to try things and when there are minimal obstacles to progress. In a way, we're supporting developers to work like they're in a start-up. They can be more experimental and productive when they don't have to deal with unnecessary challenges, rules and obstacles. It's not a question of ignoring the rules, merely proactively looking to minimise their negative impact wherever possible.
The faster the team can autonomously and safely move, the greater the competitive advantage they can deliver. Which, of course, aligns with the original objectives of DevOps. Organisations that move slowly enough to avoid breaking anything by not quantifying risk and not having a culture of experimentation tend to be outperformed in the market. Ultimately, it's worth considering the perspective of developers because it enables the entire organisation to innovate and deliver faster.
Learn more about our DevEx approach
If you'd like to learn how to implement the tools, processes, and culture that support DevEx, please get in touch.
Written by
DevOps Lead
From a background as a Linux sysadmin, Matt is an authority in all things DevOps. At Adaptavist and beyond, he champions DevOps ways of working, helping teams maximise people, process and technology to deliver software efficiently and safely.