# Improve developer experience

Developer experience is about whether engineers can do their best work every day. When they spend their time fighting slow pipelines, unclear priorities, or constant context switching, productivity and motivation suffer. The challenge is spotting where friction comes from — before frustration turns into attrition.

Swarmia gives you the data to see how engineers are spending their time, and whether the conditions for focused, effective work are in place.

## **Start with CI visibility**

Slow or unreliable pipelines are a major source of frustration, yet most CI providers offer little visibility into performance trends. Swarmia surfaces [runtime trends and failure rates](https://help.swarmia.com/features/metrics/get-visibility-into-your-ci-pipeline) across your repositories and workflows — so you can spot slowdowns, identify flaky pipelines, and drill into individual jobs to diagnose issues.

## **PR feedback loop**

Use [code metrics](https://help.swarmia.com/features/metrics/code-metrics) to understand whether engineers are getting timely feedback on their work. Long review wait times, PRs stuck in progress, or late-arriving reviews are signs the feedback loop is broken — and that engineers may be losing context or momentum while they wait.

## **Listen to engineers directly**

Developer experience [surveys](https://help.swarmia.com/features/run-developer-experience-surveys/managing-surveys) give you a structured way to collect signal on clarity, empowerment, and satisfaction — going beyond what metrics alone can tell you. Engineers can flag issues with tooling, technical debt, test coverage, and on-call load: things that slow them down every day. Surveys also help you tell apart systemic problems from team-specific ones.

## **Make all work visible**

Maintaining focus and limiting work in progress is often the best starting point for improving developer experience. Use the [work log](https://help.swarmia.com/features/focus/analyzing-the-activity-patterns-on-work-log) to see a complete picture of the team's daily work — combining Git and issue tracker data — so you can spot harmful patterns like too much reactive work, people working alone on projects, or initiatives that stall.

For a deeper view, [issue metrics](https://help.swarmia.com/features/metrics/issue-cycle-time) show how work in progress and issue cycle time have evolved over time. Pay attention to flow efficiency — the share of days an issue was actively worked on during its lifetime. Below 70% is worth investigating; above 95% is considered great. It's one of the clearest signals of whether your team finishes work before starting the next thing.

## **Set shared expectations**

Once you've identified friction points, use [working agreements](https://help.swarmia.com/features/working-agreements) to set shared standards around things like review turnaround times or limits on issues in progress. These make expectations visible and help teams stay accountable without constant management overhead.

Teams on Slack can receive a daily digest to stay aware of how well they're keeping to their agreements.

With clear data and a habit of listening to your engineers, you can move from reacting to individual complaints to systematically improving the conditions for great work.


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://help.swarmia.com/guides/improve-developer-experience.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.