Developer experience: concept and definition

ABSTRACT

New ways of working such as globally distributed development or the integration of self-motivated external developers into software ecosystems will require a better and more comprehensive understanding of developers' feelings, perceptions, motivations and identification with their tasks in their respective project environments. User experience is a concept that captures how persons feel about products, systems and services. It evolved from disciplines such as interaction design and usability to a much richer scope that includes feelings, motivations, and satisfaction. Similarly, developer experience could be defined as a means for capturing how developers think and feel about their activities within their working environments, with the assumption that an improvement of the developer experience has positive impacts on characteristics such as sustained team and project performance. This article motivates the importance of developer experience, sketches related approaches from other domains, proposes a definition of developer experience that is derived from similar concepts in other domains, describes an ongoing empirical study to better understand developer experience, and finally gives an outlook on planned future research activities.

References

1. A. Endres and D. Rombach, A Handbook of Software and Systems Engineering. Empirical Observations, Laws and Theories, ser. The Fraunhofer IESE Series on Software Engineering. Addison Wesley, 2003.
2. H. Sackman, W. J. Erikson, and E. E. Grant, "Exploratory experimental studies comparing online and offline programming performance," Commun. ACM, vol. 11, pp. 3--11, January 1968.
3. T. DeMarco and T. Lister, "Programmer performance and the effects of the workplace," in Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Software engineering, ser. ICSE '85. Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1985, pp. 268--272.
4. A. Mockus, "Organizational volatility and its effects on software defects," in Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, ser. FSE '10. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2010, pp. 117--126.
5. N. Nagappan, B. Murphy, and V. Basili, "The influence of organizational structure on software quality: an empirical case study," in Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering, ser. ICSE '08. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2008, pp. 521--530.
6. C. Bird, N. Nagappan, H. Gall, B. Murphy, and P. Devanbu, "Putting it all together: using socio-technical networks to predict failures," in Proceedings of the 20th IEEE international conference on software reliability engineering, ser. ISSRE'09. Piscataway, NJ, USA: IEEE Press, 2009, pp. 109--119.
7. A. Trendowicz and J. Münch, "Factors influencing software development productivity -- state-of-the-art and industrial experiences," Advances in computers, vol. 77, pp. 185--241, 2009.
8. T. DeMarco and T. Lister, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd ed. Dorset House, Feb. 1999.
9. A. Mockus and J. Herbsleb, "Challenges of global software development," in Software Metrics Symposium, 2001. METRICS 2001. Proceedings. Seventh International, 2001, pp. 182--184.
10. H. Holmstrom, E. O. Conchuir, P. J. Agerfalk, and B. Fitzgerald, "Global software development challenges: A case study on temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance," in Global Software Engineering, 2006. ICGSE '06. International Conference on, 2006, pp. 3--11.
11. D. Šmite, C. Wohlin, T. Gorschek, and R. Feldt, "Empirical evidence in global software engineering: a systematic review," Empirical Software Engineering, vol. 15, pp. 91--118, 2010.
12. T. Abdel-Hamid, "The slippery path to productivity improvement," IEEE Software, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 43--52, 1996.
13. H. Holmström, B. Fitzgerald, P. J. Ågerfalk, and E. O. Conchuir, "Agile practices reduce distance in global software development," Information Systems Management, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 7--18, 2006.
14. R. B. Hyman, "Creative chaos in high performance teams: An experience report," Communications of the ACM, vol. 36, no. 10, pp. 57--60, 1993.
15. ISO 9241-210:2010. Ergonomics of human system interaction -- Part 210: Human-centered design for interactive systems. Switzerland: International Organization for Standardization (ISO), 2010.
16. E. L.-C. Law, V. Roto, M. Hassenzahl, A. P. Vermeeren, and J. Kort, "Understanding, scoping and defining user experience: a survey approach," in Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, ser. CHI '09. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2009, pp. 719--728.
17. V. Roto, E. Law, A. Vermeeren, and J. Hoonhout, Eds., User experience white paper: Bringing clarity to the concept of user experience, Feb. 2011, result from Dagstuhl Seminar on Demarcating User Experience, September 15-18, 2010. {Online}. Available: http://www.allaboutux.org/uxwhitepaper
18. A. Palmer, "Customer experience management: a critical review of an emerging idea," Journal of Services Marketing, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 196--208, 2010.
19. "American marketing association dictionary," retrieved 23.1.2012. {Online}. Available: http://www.marketingpower.com/_layouts/Dictionary.aspx?dLetter=B
20. J. J. Brakus, B. H. Schmitt, and L. Zarantonello, "Brand experience: What is it? how is it measured? does it affect loyalty?." Journal of Marketing, vol. 73, no. 3, pp. 52--68, 2009.
21. N. Agarwal and U. Rathod, "Defining 'success' for software projects: An exploratory revelation," International Journal of Project Management, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 358--370, 2006.
22. M. Freeman and P. Beale, "Measuring project success," Project Management Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 8--17, 1992.
23. F. Herzberg, Work and the Nature of Man. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1966.
24. S. Beecham, N. Baddoo, T. Hall, H. Robinson, and H. Sharp, "Motivation in software engineering: A systematic literature review," Information and Software Technology, vol. 50, pp. 860--878, August 2008.
25. N. Baddoo, T. Hall, and D. Jagielska, "Software developer motivation in a high maturity company: A case study," Software Process Improvement and Practice, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 219--228, 2006.
26. T. Hall, D. Jagielska, and N. Baddoo, "Motivating developer performance to improve project outcomes in a high maturity organization," Software Quality Journal, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 365--381, 2007.
27. R. A. Mata Toledo and E. A. Unger, "Another look at motivating data processing professionals," SIGCPR Computer-Personnel, vol. 10, pp. 1--7, January 1985.
28. J. D. Couger, "Motivators vs. demotivators in the is environment," Journal of Systems Management, vol. 39, pp. 36--41, June 1988.
29. J. D. Couger and H. Adelsberger, "Comparing motivation of programmers and analysts in different socio/political environments: Austria compared to the united states," SIGCPR Computer-Personnel, vol. 11, pp. 13--17, September 1988.
30. W. Mellis, "Software quality management in turbulent times -- are there alternatives to process oriented software quality management?" Software Quality Journal, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 277--295, 1998.
31. M. Diaz and J. Sligo, "How software process improvement helped Motorola," IEEE Software, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 75--81, sep/oct 1997.
32. K. Blanchard, D. Carew, and E. Parisi-Carew, "How to get your group to perform like a team," Training and Development, vol. 50, no. September, pp. 34--37, 1996.
33. E. Whitworth, "Experience report: The social nature of agile teams," in Proceedings of the Agile 2008 Conference. Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society, 2008, pp. 429--435.
34. T.-P. Liang, C.-C. Liu, T.-M. Lin, and B. Lin, "Effect of team diversity on software project performance," Industrial Management and Data Systems, vol. 107, no. 5, pp. 636--653, 2007.
35. M. Madachy, R. Raffo, and D. Kellner, "Software process simulation modeling: Why? what? how?" Journal of Systems and Software, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 91--105, 1999.
36. H. Zhang, B. Kitchenham, and D. Pfahl, "Reflections on 10 years of software process simulation modeling: A systematic review," in Making Globally Distributed Software Development a Success Story, ser. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Q. Wang, D. Pfahl, and D. Raffo, Eds. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg, 2008, vol. 5007, pp. 345--356.
37. E. Aarts and S. Marzano, The New Everyday: Views on Ambient Intelligence. 010 Publishers, 2003.
38. J. Dewey, Art as Experience. New York: Perigree Trade, 1980.