The Key to Good Developer Experience Easy Workflows
Good developer experience is necessary for every company that has software developers as employees because it can spur innovation, customer satisfaction and business growth. To ensure good developer experience among software developers, easy workflows can be very important.
Easy workflows ensure a developer has a good feeling while interacting with a codebase as all the units and components of the entire codebase are properly laid out. To have a proper understanding of why easy workflows are the key to good developer experience, it is necessary to know what a workflow means from a developer point of view. So what is a workflow?
What is a Workflow?
A workflow is an arranged and repeatable pattern of an activity that organizes resources into processes that transform materials to provide services, complete a task or process information.
For example, if there is a need to create a note taking application, we can map out necessary resources or steps to render a note taking service as in the following: take input → button clicked → save input. That is a very basic example of a workflow and it can be more robust depending on the complexity of the problem and requirements at hand.
Making workflows easy to understand or work with is a huge factor to improve developer experience for reasons ranging from understanding of operation process, easy identification of redundancy, improved accountability and reduced micromanagement, improved communication, provision of relevant custmer services and quality codebases.
How Do Workflows Improve Developer Experience?
Common Understanding
Understanding of how a business operation should be implemented may vary from one developer to another but having an easy workflow that clearly maps out how it should be implemented helps developers to have a common understanding and work collectively without unnecessary back and forth. Such collective clarity enables developers to avoid disputes and have cohesive relationships.
Having cordial relationships help them have good developer experience because they feel good about the people they work with.
Reduced Micromanagement
In a working environment where employees take up their responsibility, micromanagement should be drastically reduced but it may not be so if managers can’t believe their dependents truly understand the tasks at hand. Easy workflows that foster common understanding among employees can boost managers’ confidence that their dependents understand what they do and there is a need to overly micromanage them.
In short, easy workflows ensure common understanding and common understanding reduces micromanagement which in turn lead to good developer experience.
Improved Communication
Ambiguity can make communication hard within a team as a team member may have certain intentions but another member gets totally different things out of it. It gets worse if employees have to collaborate on tasks but they have different understandings of how the tasks should be done and expect different outcomes based on their understanding.
This situation can lead to dispute among teammates, destroy their collaborative spirit and therefore, affect the objective of their tasks. Often, such misunderstanding tends to lead to bad developer experience as they may not feel good about the people they work with and that is bad for business.
Improved Accountability
Easy workflows improve accountability from developers because what is expected of them is clearly mapped out. That means it is easy to check whether their implementations reflect the expectations of their requirements expressed with workflows. Then, developers are held accountable with little or no ambiguity.
This phenomenon would force or spur developers to do their jobs as expected. It makes developers aware of what is expected of them and adjust when things get tough with some level of understanding thereby, keeping them positive in tough times.
Adequate Customer Services
Since easy workflows foster common understanding, it means developers can easily attend to any complaint from the customers because they understand the operations within their products.
By attending to complaints or issues swiftly, they ensure customers have good experience which means profit and growth for the business and the growth of business means developers can get more perks, salary increments, and so on. This means such developers have good experience in return for satisfying customers’ wants.
Conclusion
Good developer experience can influence the growth of tech companies as their productivity can impact users’ experience. To ensure there is good developer experience, easy workflows can be very useful as it has to do with understanding of how their products work. Proper understanding of processes to achieve products’ functionalities can foster cohesive collaboration, improve accountability, and so on.
Developer experience can be determined by how they feel towards their co-worker, codebase and their own personal interstate. Easy workflows make it easy to avoid situations that tend to affect developer experience by ensuring a common understanding.