Developer experience survey: 14 questions on where engineers lose time
Fourteen questions your engineers answer in about four minutes, each about their own last four weeks of work.
- 14questions
- About 4 minto answer
- 9 statementsone agree scale
- 4 weeksof one person's work
The 14 DevEx survey questions
A developer experience survey asks the people who write, review and ship your code where their working time goes: waiting on builds and reviews, working out how systems behave, and finding time to focus. This DevEx survey covers all three in fourteen questions, and you can create a free survey from it with your own team names.
Your work
Two taps that sort every later answer by team and by time spent coding.
- Which team do you mostly work in?replace the options with your own team names.
- In the last four weeks, how much of your time went on writing, reviewing or shipping code?lets you read part-time coders apart from full-time ones.
Waiting on feedback
How long an engineer waits to learn whether a change works: the build, the reviewer, the pipeline, the release.
- A local build and test run is quick enough that I do not switch to something else while I wait.
- Review of my changes usually starts within one working day.compare a low score with your review timestamps.
- When the pipeline fails, the output tells me why without digging.low scores usually point at flaky tests or unreadable logs.
- Getting a merged change into production needs no manual chasing.
Understanding the system
The effort it takes to know enough to change something safely.
- I can work out how a service I do not own behaves without having to ask someone.
- The documentation I rely on is accurate enough to act on.
- Getting access to a repository, tool or environment I need does not stall my work.often the cheapest fix: an access request with a named owner.
Time to focus
Whether the week leaves room for work that needs a long stretch of attention.
- Most days I get at least one two-hour stretch without meetings or interruptions.
- Unplanned work rarely breaks up the work I had planned for the day.low scores point at on-call load and urgent requests.
- In the last four weeks, which of these cost you the most time?count the ticks per option to rank your fixes.
In your words, then the rating
One optional box, then the single number you track from round to round.
- If you could remove one thing that slows you down, what would it be?one thing each, so the answers group and count.
- Overall, how would you rate your developer experience over the last four weeks?report the share who chose good or very good.
How to run your developer survey
Send it to everyone who writes, reviews or ships code, platform and QA engineers included. A quarterly or semi-annual cadence suits most organizations,[1] so pick the same week each round and keep the wording identical. No name is asked: report by team, and merge any team with fewer than five answers.
The three blocks follow the DevEx framework's core dimensions: feedback loops, cognitive load and flow state.[1] Score the agree items 5 down to 1 and average each block. The lowest block is where to start, the ticks on question 12 rank the fixes inside it, and the share answering good or very good on question 14 is the number to track.
For the sprint that just ended, send one team a retrospective survey before its retro. A single tool up for renewal gets a software evaluation survey.
Developer experience survey FAQ
What questions should a DevEx survey ask?
Ask about concrete, recent events: whether the build finished before you switched tasks, whether review started within a working day, whether the docs were accurate enough to act on. Add one tick list of time sinks, one open answer and an overall rating.
Should a developer experience survey be anonymous?
Yes. Ask for a team and never a name, leave out role and seniority fields, and report a team only when five or more of its engineers answered.
Who should answer a developer survey?
Everyone who writes, reviews or ships code. Engineering managers who rarely code can answer too, because question 2 lets you read them apart. Laptop and ticket complaints from the whole company call for IT survey questions instead.
Michael Hodge, survey methodology · Updated 2 October 2026 · How templates are reviewed
Sources (1)
- Noda, A., Storey, M.-A., Forsgren, N. and Greiler, M. "DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity." Communications of the ACM 66(11), November 2023, 44-49. cacm.acm.org
Find out where your engineers lose time
Fourteen questions, about four minutes, no names asked. Add your own team names in the editor and send it to everyone who ships code.
Use this template