What are developer experience surveys telling leaders?

That's why we took a different approach with our Developer Experience (DevEx) capability at Allstacks. Instead of just counting lines of code or tracking sprint velocities, we're diving into what actually makes developers tick. By blending those traditional metrics with real, honest feedback, we're finally giving engineering leaders the full picture - not just what their teams are doing, but how they're doing.

Here's the thing - at Allstacks we are really good at showing you all those traditional engineering metrics. But something interesting kept happening in our conversations with engineering leaders. They'd look at these impressive dashboards and say, "Yeah, but..." And that "but" was usually followed by something like "my best team shows terrible velocity because they're tackling tech debt" or "we're hitting all our metrics, but I can tell my team is burning out."

That's what got us thinking - what if we could capture both sides of the story? So we built these DevEx surveys right into Slack (because that's where developers live anyway, right?). Now you're not just seeing the numbers, you're hearing directly from your team about what's working and what isn't. 

What you're about to see is a journey through three layers of insight: from high-level team health metrics all the way down to the candid comments from individual developers. 

Let's dive in...

Chart 1 - Summary of Developer Survey

Let’s break down what we're seeing in this developer experience survey - it's pretty interesting. 

What we see here is essentially a health check-up for how developers feel about their daily work life. Across the board, teams are rating their experience at a 3.6 out of 5 - not too shabby, but definitely room for growth.

Here are the standout findings:

• First off, the deployment and release process is the star of the show, scoring an impressive 4.1. Developers are clearly happy with how code makes its way to production - which is huge for maintaining momentum and shipping with confidence.
• On the flip side, the actual development process itself scored the lowest at 3.3. This suggests there might be some friction points in developers' day-to-day coding experience that are worth digging into. Maybe it's tooling issues, or perhaps there are process bottlenecks we're not seeing.

Chart 2 - Dive into a Specific Category

As we dive deeper into the data from our developer experience survey, a clear picture is emerging about our product development process - and it's raising some important flags we need to address.

Here's what really stands out:

• Striking is the gap between our performance and expectations when it comes to managing requirement changes. Despite having formal processes in place for communicating and managing these changes, we're notably short of our ambitious 4.0 target. In the fast-paced world of software development, it's a potential red flag for team agility and project success.
• Documentation and implementation detail is scoring just 3.3, which might be contributing to our requirements management challenges. Clear documentation from the start could help reduce the impact of changes down the line.
• There's a silver lining in how we're breaking down deliverables (3.9) - this suggests our teams have the foundational agile skills to handle changes well, once we fix the underlying process issues.

Chart 3 - Looking at Specific Comments

Looking at the actual comments from developers about product documentation, we're getting some fascinating raw feedback that adds color to that 3.3 score we saw earlier. The comments paint a picture of a team in transition - there's acknowledgment of improvement, but also some clear frustration about recurring issues.

Let’s break down what's really jumping out from these comments:

• There's a critical gap in what teams consider "shovel ready" work. One developer put it pretty bluntly - they're getting epics that lack the basics: clear motivation, stakeholder identification, and detailed use cases. This isn't just about documentation; it's about project readiness.
• What's encouraging is that no one's saying this is unfixable - in fact, most comments acknowledge positive movement. But reading between the lines, it seems like we need a more structured approach to what constitutes "ready" documentation before it hits engineering teams.

The Allstacks View: Quantitative vs Qualitative - It's "AND" not "OR"!

Remember when we thought lines of code and story points told the whole story? Those days feel like ancient history now, but some habits die hard. Even today, too many engineering leaders find themselves stuck in the "numbers vs. narrative" debate when trying to understand their teams.

Here's the thing - it's not about choosing between data and developer feedback. The real magic happens when you bring them together. Think about it like this: traditional metrics like cycle time, deployment frequency, and sprint velocity are crucial baseline indicators. But should you make decisions about your engineering team based purely on these numbers? Not if you want the full story.

That's where the qualitative side comes in. When you pair those metrics with real feedback from your developers - their experiences, tools, frustrations, and wins - you start seeing the whole picture. Maybe your DORA metrics look great on paper, but your team is burning out getting there. Or perhaps your sprint velocity seems low, but that's because your team is tackling crucial technical debt that will make them faster in the long run.

The Allstacks bottom line? Stop thinking about it as quantitative OR qualitative. In today's engineering world, you need both.