The Secret to Dev Productivity is Joy

There’s an unhealthy obsession with companies looking for a way to measure developer productivity.

The desire to measure productivity is understandable; senior leaders have been under pressure to deliver results while capitalising on their investments in teams and technology. There are no sinister intentions behind measuring developer productivity; leaders genuinely want their teams to be as productive as possible. The problem is that developer productivity is incredibly difficult to measure, resulting in organisations allocating disproportionate effort and resources while trying to find the magic metric.

The fact is, happy developers are productive developers. The two ingredients to developer joy are a great developer experience and a positive engineering culture. Intentionally improving the developer experience by helping teams navigate complexity, remove friction, and increase focus time leads to happier and more productive developers.

Improving developer experience within an organisation leads to satisfied, more productive developers. Companies that work towards improving developer experience and engineering culture will have more productive developers and will outperform their competitors. Companies that don’t, wont and will still be looking for ways to measure developer productivity.

If you are interested in learning more, we’d recommend checking out Building great developer experiences: culture & tools with Sven Peters, Atlassian Developer Advocate and Daniel Tao Atlassian Head of Engineering, DevOps.

Presenter Bio:

Andrew Boyagi has led multi-disciplinary technology teams for more than 20 years, most recently at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia where he led the development of an internal platform adopted by over 7,000 engineers. Today, Andrew leads the Agile and DevOps Evangelism team at Atlassian where he regularly meets with Fortune 500 companies, traveling the world advising them on optimising for high-performing and engaged software teams and leadership.