# Optimizing Developer Productivity Within Your Team ![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/BJBmaQLcgk7zVo1R0ihIZnRkumaJnVWrszpa-QztPmeEGBt-0aKp0an2c_KRF5QzJ0F0w_a_tez9YT1yIFAEHtk6MEhPKMvpty0OLGeP1tlgLPRVFig1cKoIsjdCqUMnd6FhtpLRsP5KUP-rXw) [Photo](https://unsplash.com/photos/KE0nC8-58MQ) by[ Carl Heyerdahl](https://unsplash.com/@carlheyerdahl?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on Unsplash Building and shipping a scalable application includes the sweat & tears of multiple teams. However, the core engineering work boils down to a bunch of developers. The product needs to be built well before it is marketed. So, the foremost factor in building a great product is by bringing the best out of the developers. While [user experience (UX)](https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/ux-design) has been the buzz of the tech world for quite some time now, developer experience is the new talk of the town. The productivity of developers is always directly related to building a performant and efficient piece of software. ## Improving Developer Productivity with Developer Experience Putting it in an abstract manner, everything that removes the verbosity in the development cycle directly or indirectly contributes to the betterment of productivity. Speaking of developer experience, it is similar to user experience, where the emphasis is built around having the best possible experience for the end-user, whereas, in developer experience, all the steps to improve the experience of the developer while building/using the application are catered. The term developer experience is not to be confused with the number of years of experience a developer has. Like everything else, developer experience could be both good and bad, although it is important to be on the good side. A good [developer experience](https://www.getport.io/blog/developer-experience) is defined by processes and workflows that provide the structure and resources necessary for developers to achieve their goals with ease and efficiency -- for example, a developer portal where devs can put in tickets for data or access. Conversely, a bad developer experience is typified by workflows that are difficult to understand, difficult to use, fail to meet expectations, and frustrate the developer. With the increase in innovation in DevOps processes, it is important to maintain strong DevEx to make sure the team is still productive. Now that we have an overview of developer productivity, let us look at some practical approaches to improving the productivity of developers within a team. ## Use Tools to Complement the Development Process Reducing manual tasks is not just limited to automating. Developer experience can also be leveraged using tools that further add value to the developer's work. For instance, organizations use some standard practices and guidelines when writing code, which is supposed to be followed by all the developers writing it, like code formatting, linting, etc. In such cases, tools like [Prettier](https://prettier.io/) come in handy. Similarly, when setting up a new project, scaffolding tools can be exploited to generate configured boilerplate code. Frameworks like React and Vue have their own CLI for scaffolding: ng generate library custom-autocomplete ng generate component components/mat-dynamic-table ng generate directive directives/click-outside ng generate pipe pipes/calculate-total Further, when it comes to debugging, IDEs like VSCode and IntelliJ have built-in debugging features to identify and fix bugs on the go. Additionally, all the modern browsers too have their own debuggers for debugging web applications.![](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/ZN5PBIy1JmhNhW7FST1xJdZffoMF5hwMwKDoVuUVDJvqupvMtgVwpNztBb-EK7edLDbxxxn8mM__cnqupdqffc4Z5DLlbLwh5gj9oOqO7I6HuNpADFg40d-medLdrJ8fchWyIKcHpNZ50_sBcw) [Source](https://betterprogramming.pub/how-to-improve-developer-experience-2d5908d7bbb0) ## Documentation That Speaks Clearly The best way to learn about the architecture and other internal systems is through the documentation written by the team/dev that developed it. If the documentation provides half-baked information about functional APIs, classes, usage environment, or just about anything, it becomes a tedious task for the developer to understand the working of a particular component. This consumes extra time in the setup itself, slowing the development pace. Having well-written documentation that clearly explains what something does, with good examples preferably, makes it lighter on the developer and helps improve productivity. A good initiative to bring about this shift is to voluntarily contribute to or suggest to the technical writers to improve on any area where other developers find it difficult to understand the documentation. This way, the documentation is continuously being improved. Automate Repetitive Tasks ------------------------- Admit it; nobody would want to hire engineers to perform the same old repetitive task. In fact, the whole point of architecting and engineering is to think out of the box and bring in new changes that improve the product on the whole. A typical and well-known instance is incorporating the CI/CD pipeline into the development lifecycle. We know how the CI pipeline integrates all the latest changes and pushes them to further stages. In the absence of CI/CD, a lot of manual work is required, using up precious time that could've instead been used to write more efficient code and other robust features. There's much more to automating repetitive tasks than just using CI/CD. There's testing, logging & monitoring, environment setup, and so forth. When the manual work is eliminated from a developer's work, there's more time for creative thinking and making more efforts to write quality code. Culture Fit and a Healthy Working Environment --------------------------------------------- A good developer experience also depends on interacting and communicating with their fellow developers on the team. A sense of ownership and responsibility should be rooted within developers. Productivity increases only when there's proper coordination between the team members. One cannot simply afford to put a bunch of indie developers in a team, give a task with a deadline and expect it to be completed in time. If you have been attending any interviews lately, you must have observed that many companies do a [culture-fit round](https://www.predictiveindex.com/blog/culture-fit-interview-questions-everything-you-need-to-know/) where they see if the candidates' thinking and vision align with the company's values and culture. If someone happens to be a great developer and is really bad when it comes to interaction and upholding the company's ethics, they ultimately wouldn't add much to the growth of the company. ## Conclusion To this day, many companies consider developer experience as a secondary need compared to user experience, but that is a bad practice in the long term. It is the developers who build the applications from scratch. Great developers build great products, and great developers are built with great developer experience.
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