developer experience

Now a days companies discussing about developer experience. Discussing still in preliminary stage where we are talking about different tools, trainings & what will make developer more productive. I want to touch here another aspect communication. Communication between developers, between different teams between different functions like product, legal.

Experience deal with people, how people see, perceive & understand things varies between individuals to individuals. To set some ground, lets watch following video. Though video is about UX, it talks lot about interfaces.

Interfaces - best interfaces are invisible

Think about JIRA or any ticketing tool. In sprint developer pick ticket, implement it & put for review. In post-covid world lot of people work from home, teams distributed in different time-zones. Imagine this - Ticket is well written, a developer, starting work early, opens a ticket, comprehends the task, and dives in without waiting for the sun to rise on other team members. It does not mean avoid discussion, it means avoiding confusion & making people self-sufficient.

Emotions matters

developers, managers, product owners think differently. Understanding that difference will be there is important. What that means is certain jargon / short-forms familiar to product-owners may not be understood by developers. Avoiding assumptions, listening & guiding people, repeating crucial information & summarizing discussions after meeting will have positive impact.

user is not dumb

Different people prefer different tools. Instead of dictating one way or tool, diversity acknowledgment and creating an environment where various tools, technologies can coexist is needed. Just as diverse cultures enrich societies, diversified technologies make the coding ecosystem more resilient. Instead of enforcing the use of a single IDE or single framework, providing a curated list of diverse tools can bring adaptability to changes.