Developer Experience goes beyond the well-known productivity metrics. If you want to get a health check on your engineering organization, you have to check the pulse of the developers with Developer Satisfaction/Happiness Surveys.

If you’ve been following the results of popular developer surveys, such as the Stack Overflow annual one, you’ve noticed that developers love to vent about how they feel, how easy it is for them to do their jobs, and what their biggest hurdles are.

Beware not to misuse that goodwill by throwing a survey at developers every time you can’t make a decision or just for the survey’s sake. Some companies bombard developers with feedback surveys to measure anything and everything. 

That’s how engineers end up having to do a developer survey almost every month, be it an onboarding survey, an internal tools satisfaction survey, a job satisfaction survey, a team collaboration survey, a career growth survey, or a big annual survey on top of everything.

Here are 7 tips on how to do Developer Satisfaction Surveys right.

1. #devrant Slack channel

One of my favorite hacks for getting effective, real-time developer feedback is to create a Slack channel named #devrant, where developers can share their frustrations in real time. 

There are no long forms to fill out, no waiting for the next survey cycle, just a safe space for developers to voice frustrations, share opinions, and vent about bottlenecks in their workflows without it feeling formal — just quick, honest feedback when things go wrong.

This Slack channel should not be considered just a void to shout into. It is also a source of valuable feedback for DevEx teams or engineering leaders, and it should be noted and collected in a more permanent way.

Also, the existence of the #devrant channel is not a reason not to do proper developer satisfaction surveys. 

But how many developers do you know that enjoy taking surveys? 

2. Quality Over Quantity

An annual or bi-annual developer survey should be enough to gather broad insights. For ongoing feedback regarding specific tooling or processes, consider quarterly check-ins, not monthly. This gives developers the time and mental space to reflect on meaningful changes instead of responding to the same questions repeatedly.

3. What Do You Want to Find Out? And Why?

Before designing a survey, you should be clear about what exactly it is that you want to find out. If you send out a survey every quarter containing multiple sections with dozens of questions, each asking about work-life balance, team collaboration, tooling, teamwork, and leadership, what are you planning to do with that data?

There is no way you can even begin to act on feedback in all of those areas, and after doing such a survey a couple of times, you’ll just end up with developers feeling the survey fatigue.

Set out a clear goal — ideally, something that came up as an outlier in your developer productivity metrics or one-on-ones with team leads or developers — get the data and work towards improving that. If you’re doing it for the first time and don’t know where to start, you can start with a developer survey containing a set of standard questions — let the answers to those reveal specific areas that need improvement.

4. Keep Developer Surveys Short and Focused

A survey should take no more than 30 minutes to complete, but the shorter, the better. To ensure more developers actually finish it, make your questions as precise as possible — instead of asking, “What are your thoughts on our code review process?” ask, “In the last month, how often were you stuck waiting on the code review?” You can always add an optional open-ended question if someone wants to explain more in detail.

5. Provide Context

Of course, you should design your surveys so developers know from the start how many questions they can expect and how long it will take to finish. But also, provide context to what specifically you are interested in finding out and why. Are you asking the questions because you want to improve the onboarding process, or are you curious about the adoption and satisfaction with a recently introduced tool?

6. Offer Anonymity

You can choose to make the developer survey entirely anonymous, but if you don’t, make sure to at least offer the option of anonymity. Some people tend to hold back if their feedback is not anonymous.

7. Use the Feedback to Show Results over Time

The best way to tank your credibility is to ask for feedback and never do anything about it. Feedback is only meaningful when it results in tangible action. After gathering responses, thoroughly analyze the data and communicate back to developers what can and will be changed, what’s difficult to change, and what can be done to change it in the future. Showing them their input has been heard and is driving improvements not only boosts motivation and productivity but also ensures more developers will participate in the surveys.

Developers want to feel heard — that’s why they enthusiastically engage with external surveys like Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey — but they also want their time respected. Get the balance right, and you’ll see more engagement, better data, and a happier team.

For more tips on Developer Experience and measuring engineering productivity, join The Hangar, a curated community for developer-experience (DX) enthusiasts!