Developer productivity poorly understood, report says

Developer productivity is neither well-understood nor enabled, according to Atlassian’s just-released State of Developer Experience Report 2024. The report also found that interest in the developer experience, or DX, is growing but efforts are lagging.

Announced July 15 and accessible at atlassian.com, the State of Developer Experience Report 2024 is based on a survey of 1,250 engineering leaders in the US, Germany, France, and Australia, and 900 developers around the world. The survey was intended to find out what practices keep software development work flowing smoothly and what practices introduce friction. Feelings about work environments in the age of generative AI and microservices also were assessed. Among the findings were that less than half of developers believe their organizations prioritize developer experience and two out of three developers lose more than eight hours a week due to inefficiencies in their roles. Also, two out of three developers are not seeing significant productivity gains from using AI tools yet.

The top five contributors to developer role complexity, according to engineering leaders, include understaffing, expansion of the developer role, new technology, switching context between tools, and collaboration with other teams. The top five contributors to developer time loss cited include technical debt, insufficient documentation, build processes, lack of time for deep work, and lack of clear direction. Almost all engineering leaders surveyed, 99%, acknowledge that the developer role has become more complex. The top five practices leaders believe will improve developer productivity and satisfaction include AI automation, provision of new collaboration tools, risk taking and experimentation, streamlining decision-making, and hosting hackathons.

Other findings in the State of Developer Experience Report 2024:

• 12% of participants surveyed believe AI tools will not improve developer productivity in the next two years.
• 51% of organizations are focused on measuring developer productivity while 49% are focused on developer satisfaction.
• 41% of leaders use tools that measure developer productivity to assess satisfaction of developer teams.
• 38% of organizations measure developer productivity by hours worked.