A broad look at developer experience research reveals a gap. Designing with Dev-X: A Systematic Mapping of Developer Experience Interventions and Their Business Impact, brings together more than a hundred empirical studies. Only 39 of those studies explicitly connected DevEx interventions to outcomes and organizational KPIs.
This finding stood out to me. Through my work with developer and open source communities, I’ve become interested in how understanding developers’ needs can inform an organization’s strategy. This research points to an area worth exploring further: connecting improvements in their everyday experience to the outcomes the organization wants to achieve.
The new Linux Foundation Research report, Optimizing Developer Experience for High Engineering Performance, offers a practical framework for approaching this challenge. Written by Ibrahim Haddad, with a foreword by Arun Gupta (NVIDIA), and published with the Developer Relations Foundation, it helps organizations make developer experience part of how they prioritize investment, organize work, and measure progress.
The report focuses on engineering teams within organizations, with lessons that can help us think about supporting developers who use our products and services.
The report organizes improvement around three pillars: streamline workflows and reduce bureaucracy, invest in integrated tools and infrastructure, and build a supportive culture.
Managers can use this framework to set priorities: identify where developers encounter friction, choose improvements that support an organizational goal, and evaluate whether they help.
This approach also gives managers a way to assess new technologies as developer workflows change. With agent-assisted development, for example, teams need to consider whether agents have the guidance, tools, and access needed to help developers complete their work.
At Stripe Sessions 2026, a demo showed how guidance and tools provided to an agent helped it complete a product integration. For developers working through agents, the experience also depends on whether those agents can find the right information and use the product correctly.
Ana’s note: This adds another dimension to understanding and supporting developers. DevRel can help teams examine these interactions, improve guidance, and bring recurring problems into product and engineering decisions. We are also discussing how these skills are evolving within the Developer Relations Foundation community.
Developer experience deserves a place in enterprise software strategy. Whether the next improvement involves better documentation, simpler access, or support for coding agents, the report offers a framework for connecting that work to organizational goals and better informing where to invest and evaluating whether those investments help the organization’s goals.