Developer experience survey template to improve your engineering processes

Welcome to this template of a developer experience survey! We hope you'll find what you are looking for, and if you're interested in the best way to manage your pull requests in Slack, you should take a look at Axolo, which helps thousands of developers merge pull requests faster (also incubated by Slack in 2023).

Introduction to the developer experience survey

This article aims to help companies who want to survey their engineers to improve the developer experience in their engineering team. We developed this survey upon the recommendations of the SPACE framework, the four key DevOps metrics from Accelerate, and our own experience working with engineering teams through Axolo.

To make a summary of all the important aspects to take into account according to the SPACE framework, you can also find and download our Engineering productivity cheatsheet below:

Engineering productivity cheatsheet inspired by the SPACE Framework

We separated this survey into 4 topics, where you can easily add or remove any question. They are:

• Code Review: code review process, quality of the code delivered, quality of feedback, code review pace
• Engineering system: use of continuous integration, degree of infrastructure satisfaction, deployment frequency, meetings, documentation,
• Testing: local and CI execution environment, test types used (UI or unit)
• Company Organization: level of happiness, coordination, remote work, synchronization, communication tools, future developments

Note from the authors: This survey should be completely anonymous. You should save each answer indepently and not in thread to prevent managers from finding who is the employee by finding out one answer.

Find the developer experience survey template

Code Review

Satisfaction with code reviews

On a scale of one to five (5 being amazing), how much would you evaluate our code review assignment and process?

What do you like about our code review process?

What do you dislike about our code review process?

Code review velocity

On a scale of one to five, what do you think of the average pick up time when you request a code review? (1 - I'm waiting too much for someone to review my code, 5 - The average pickup time is amazing)

Please write down any comments or suggestions you think we should apply to improve our code review velocity.

Code review acceptance rate

On a scale of one to five, how would you describe the code review acceptance rate for your request? (1 - Code reviews are too picky or code reviews are not picky enough, 5 - I'm happy with the acceptance rate )

Please write down any comments or suggestions you think we should apply to our code review acceptance rate.

Code review score (quality of thoughtfulness)

On a scale of one to five, how would you rate the quality of thoughtfulness when you request a code review? (1 - People are not sharing useful knowledge or are rude, 5 - Colleagues share valuable knowledge the right way)

Can you explain?

Engineering system

Satisfaction with the engineering system (e.g., CI/CD pipeline)

On a scale of one to five, how much would you evaluate our engineering system (e.g., CI/CD pipelines, ...)?

Do you have specific request on how we could improve our engineering system or if we should use new tools?

Deployment frequency

Rate this statement from one to five, "we deploy our code often enough"?

(1 - I don't agree with our deployment, 5 - I agree with our deployment frequency)

Please write down any comments or suggestions you think we should apply to improve our deployment process.

quality of meetings

On a scale of one to five, what do you think about company's meetings policy? (1 - I'm not happy with meetings (we have too many, or we have too few meetings), 5 - I'm happy with the number of meetings I have)

What do you like about our meeting policy?

What do you dislike about our meeting policy?

Quality of documentation and knowledge sharing

On a scale from 1 to 5, rate this statement: "the documentation of the tools I'm using is well made and easily comprehensible"? (1 - Documentation is really badly written and I can't understand it well, 5 - Documentation is amazing 🦄)

On a scale of 1 to 5, rate this statement: "I can easily find the information I'm looking for" ? (1 - I'm interrupted all the time and can't focus, 5 - I'm never interrupted and have the time to focus)

Please write down any comments or suggestions you think we should apply to improve our documentation and knowledge sharing.

Testing environment

On a scale from 1 to 5, how would you rate the quality of the testing environment? (1- Not enough testing, it's hard to test, I'm having troubles launching the test environment, or there is too much process, 5- Testing is easy, I'm notified in the right manner, I can easily find what is going wrong)

What problems have you usually encountered with the test environment? Any problem with CI or your local environment?

Please write down any comments or suggestions you think we should apply to improve our testing environment

Company organization

Developer satisfaction & retention

On a scale of one to five, how likely are you to recommend [our company] as a place to work?

What do you like about working at [our company]?

What do you dislike about working at [our company]?

Lack of interruptions

On a scale of 1 to 5, rate this statement: "I can focus without interruption in my work" ? (1 - I'm interrupted all the time and can't focus, 5 - I'm never interrupted and have the time to focus)

Do you think team coordination is appropriate?

How satisfied are you with working remotely?

Please write down any comments or suggestions you think we should apply to improve our organization.

Productivity perception

What tools are you missing in order to be more productive at work?

On a scale of one to five, how much do you think our team creates the right space for productivity?

Do you have any idea on how we could improve this?

Future projects

On a scale of one to five, how much are you happy about the project you work on?

What projects do you think the core team should tackle?

Is there anything you’d like to say that didn’t fit elsewhere?

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