3 Words Driving Software Developer Productivity & Motivation

This talk highlight the view of cognitive psychologists on software developer productivity and developer experience. It aims to help developers and tech managers in their decisions about communication, people and processes, providing them with a short and useful theoretical framework taken from social and organizational psychology.

This presentation uncovers how the senses of being autonomous, competent and related to other people (a.k.a. The Self-Determination Theory’s three main pillars) influence satisfaction, efficiency, and communication dimensions, and thus overall developer productivity and experience.

It dissects the Self-Determination Theory and discusses concrete strategies to foster software engineers’ subjective experiences to boost their satisfaction and productivity based on comprehensive research data.

Here are a few examples how autonomy, competence and relatedness to others manifest themselves in everyday tasks of software developers:

• Developers’ feeling of autonomy is higher when coding and lower when they are in meetings or writing emails;
• Developers’ feeling of competence drops when they are bugfixing;
• When developers help colleagues they experience higher levels of competence and relatedness to a team

Having in mind three core subjective feelings – feeling of autonomy, competence and relatedness – when making decisions either about people and software development teams, or about work and tooling, will boost satisfaction and productivity in your engineering organizations.

Video producer: https://gotocph.com/