Software developers as users: Developer experience of a cross-platform integrated development environment

Abstract

Software development is professional activity that demands a plethora of skills and qualities from the developer. For instance, developers need technical skills to create the code that implements the running software and social skills to be able to collaborate with peer developers and with various stakeholders. Development is an endeavor towards building complex systems that realize user and business requirements in technologically sophisticated manner. Considering the challenges of software development, developer experience is a highly unstudied topic. Developers are users of multifaceted development tools such as integrated development environments. Yet, little is known of how to support developers in their demanding tasks. This paper presents early results towards increasing the understanding of developer experience in order to enable improvement of development tools to better support software developers in their activities. We present qualitative results of a survey study with 45 developers from 21 countries considering developers’ perception of a particular integrated development environment.