If you’re an engineering lead you’re probably facing the problem of finding and retaining enough good developers. After all, there’s always a lot of code to write, but there are almost never enough people to do it.
AI coding tools and automation can help you escape this negative cycle. By enhancing the developer experience (DX), they can boost job satisfaction and increase developer productivity. Great DX reduces churn and lets teams deliver more – even with a less than optimal headcount.
What is Developer Experience?
Sometimes your team members will say parts of their job make them question their career choices. Just like the rest of us, really.
The tasks that make developers most unhappy are typically the manual, repetitive, boring stuff – tasks that would feel too time-consuming in even the most well-resourced team.
A good developer experience focuses on empowering developers to do their best work by making these vital-but-tedious tasks easy to perform, and removing the rough edges and sticky spots from related processes. That means things like more automation, seamless integrations which minimize context switching, documentation that’s easy to understand and action, and so on.
Why does Developer Experience matter?
Like a car needs fuel, your company needs an adequately resourced dev team to stay in the race for customers. But talent shortages mean developers have more agency than ever before. Recruitment and retention of high-quality talent is extremely challenging, so teams are often under-resourced and under pressure.
Many businesses try to solve this problem with high salaries and frequent raises. This may help temporarily but it won’t drive greater productivity, nor improve the day-to-day experience that inspires developers to stay. Sooner or later they’ll head for the exit, leaving you yet again to puzzle over how and where to find replacements.
Great developer experience is a sustainable solution to the problems of talent shortages, productivity, and employee churn. Keeping these essential people happy helps to secure the resources, knowledge, skills and continuity the business needs to maintain a competitive edge.
Creating great developer experience with AI-powered automation
Lately everyone’s been talking about how AI automation tools can help writers, designers, lawyers, mathematicians, artist – and pretty much anyone you can think of.
But it’s also important to acknowledge how the right AI coding tools can improve the lives of developers. Here are three of the ways AI supports better developer experience.
1. Space for thought and creativity
Development processes still contain a lot of unappealing tasks, like writing boilerplate, figuring out API syntax, and analyzing how old legacy code is supposed to work.
AI automation tools are starting to have the capacity to take care of some of the more tedious jobs. That allows developers to spend less time on work they dislike and focus more energy on the things they love doing – like problem-solving, pushing the art of the possible, and exploring new ideas.
For most, the chance to do more interesting work – and to actually achieve all they set out to – means more job satisfaction. Especially when the alternative is a to-do list of tedium that never seems to get smaller.
2. Making a business impact
As AI coding tools become ever more advanced they can be used to to do an increasingly wide range of things. Code suggestions are already moving beyond simple boilerplate, and complex tasks like automatic unit test writing are now possible – and there’s no doubt more on the horizon.
The right AI-powered automation tools not only alleviate daily tedium – they make each unit of work that much faster. That means developers can adapt more quickly and create more value within the business by getting solutions to market sooner.
With AI on their side development teams are less likely to hear complaints about how long things take to get done, and more likely to feel their work is making an impact.
3. Getting it right first time
Some of us work best under pressure. But there’s always a limit, and for hard-pressed software development teams it’s exceeded all too often. That’s when errors really start to stack up. But more errors lead to more work and stress, which leads to … more errors and stress. And so on in a vicious cycle.
Even when things aren’t quite that bad, it’s embarrassing for developers when their mistakes are discovered by others, and frustrating to know that time could have been better spent if they’d been caught earlier.
AI helps developers get code right before it’s committed to the repo and passed on to QA. Autonomous unit test writing, for example, delivers more test coverage that spots regressions sooner. This shift left means fewer errors and less stressed developers, which means fewer errors… And so on.
This virtuous cycle minimizes rework, increases accuracy, reduces cycle time and ensures your new solutions get to market faster: good news stories for developers, and for the business.
It’s not just about how you’re working…
While demand for dev skills is likely to continue outstripping supply for the foreseeable future, your commercial success hinges on your ability to keep your team happy and productive.
But it’s not just about how they’re working. The code, applications and platforms they’re working on can also have an impact. In our recent survey 40% of engineering leaders said failing to modernize Java applications will increase developer churn.
To discover more about how modernization and AI coding tools can positively impact developer experience, download the full Java Application Modernization Survey Report, or watch our webinar “Automating for greater developer experience” with expert guest Rachel Stephens from analyst firm Redmonk.
