Great Developer experience is all about optimizing the developers’ workflows, processes, work environment, and more, so that they can have a more meaningful and delightful experience. The easiest way to understand developer experience is to take a concept you’re likely more familiar with: user experience. Krzysztof Wróbel, Director of Engineering at Codilime, proposes three pillars of developer experience: usability, findability, and credibility. Notably, these three items are also on UX pioneer Peter Morville’s famous list of pillars for user experience.

Developer experience is great for DevOps, the methodology that integrates development and operations and closes the gaps in the overarching software development life cycle. 

A developer experience team has many functions, including:

Writing technical documentation
Technical documentation includes release notes, knowledge bases, user manuals — any type of writing that describes the use cases and “how-to” behind a product or service. The developer experience team should provide documentation pertaining to the processes and workflows of the development team. This will not only help to standardize things, but it will also come in handy when onboarding new developers. Further, technical documentation is crucial for external developers who are using your app’s API or SDK.

Selecting developer tools
A developer experience team makes sure that the development team has all the tools they need to get the job done well. They should choose tools based on their functionality and ease of use, and they should make sure that tools are standardized across the team. According to Codilime, such tools may include deployment pipelines, tools for testing frameworks, tools for observability and monitoring, and more.

Defining workflows
Along with standardizing developer tools, the developer experience team also standardizes workflows. Great DX aims to find opportunities to make processes and procedures more efficient, identify and minimize bottlenecks, and overall just make things easier for the developers.

Our team’s responsibilities range from educating our engineers and managers on development best practices to providing technical documentation and standardizing development flows with programming language support,” shares Nikolay Sokratov, Uber’s Head of Developer Experience. “Take, for example, our Dev Exp engineers. These developers create various tools to increase engineering productivity at Uber such as build systems, integration tests, test systems, scaffolding, and language frameworks. They also work on large-scale infrastructure projects that deal with managing services using serverless platforms and distributed workflow systems.