Atlassian, maker of developer collaboration tools, has sponsored new research showing that “misalignment between engineers and their leaders is possibly the leading cause of a sub-optimal developer experience.”

The research is formed of two surveys, one conducted by DX, specialists in evaluating developer productivity, and the other by Wakefield Research, a market research firm. DX surveyed 900 developers around the world, and Wakefield Research contacted 1,250 engineering leaders.

The two surveys did not ask exactly the same questions, nor is developer experience precisely defined. Atlassian appears to treat developer experience as a combination of satisfaction and productivity. The developer survey does identify several things that run counter to a good experience, including wasting time because of “organizational impediments.” 69 percent of developers waste 8 or more hours per week on such things, according to respondents.

What are these impediments? The top issue cited is technical debt, incurred when sub-optimal code remains unfixed because of pressure to deliver new features. Next up is insufficient documentation, which might translate to time spent peering at the code trying to figure out how it is meant to work; and slow build processes. Perhaps most damning is “lack of clear direction,” cited by 25 percent of developers as a cause of time loss. Another issue is interruptions causing lack of time for deep work, reported by 27 percent.

The view from the engineering leaders is rather different. Top issues from their perspective are understaffing, expansion of the developer role, new technology, context-switching, and collaboration (or lack of it) between teams. The top solution favoured by leaders is equally AI automation and new collaboration tools, both cited by 37 percent. 

How much will AI help in practice? This remains an open question. 16 percent of developers say it already greatly improves productivity, 22 percent say moderately, and 52 percent say hardly at all. The general feeling is that AI tools will improve, but there is no consensus. Sadly the report fails to drill down into more detail, such as whether AI is more appreciated in certain specific areas of development.

Good developer experience may be hard to pin down, but we’re told 90 percent of developers consider it at least moderately important, and 86 percent of leaders also regard it as critical to attracting and retaining developers. The report implies though that efforts being made to improve developer experience are in most cases not working. Only 23 percent of developers are satisfied with the time their employers are spending on this issue.

Atlassian proposes a “simple framework” to measure and improve developer processes, consisting of asking developers what causes most friction in their workflows, tracking and measuring that friction, and monitoring the impact of any changes implemented.

The snag with this approach is that organizational culture both has a big impact on developer experience, and is hard to change. A recent study of agile development, reported by the Register, concluded that “projects where engineers felt they had the freedom to discuss and address problems were 87 percent more likely to succeed.” If developers do not feel they have this freedom, then Atlassian’s simple framework cannot succeed.

In the report, Atlassian CTO Rajeev Rajan confessed that “developer experience is an ongoing challenge for Atlassian, too” and stated that his own team is “figuring out how to act” on the survey results.

The full report is here.