Once your survey ends, you can view aggregate survey data to understand where your team currently stands. You can also view conversation starters and resources to help you decide where to focus next.
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Permissions
All users can automatically access the Developer surveys report in Flow. All users who have taken a survey can see aggregate team results for that survey as well as resources for additional learning.
Additional permissions can be configured to give more survey visibility to individual users. Configure these permissions at the role level.
- Ability to view comments and conversation starters
- Ability to view survey results for all surveys, regardless whether they've taken a survey.
Developer thriving survey overview
The Developer thriving survey is a research-backed approach to understanding and improving team health.
The Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight wanted to understand how real-world developers and their teams achieve success. Their findings were based on quantitative data from 1300 developers and rich qualitative data from 15+ hours of conversation in interviews and focus groups.
After analyzing their research, they discovered four factors foundational to positive developer experience and better team outcomes like higher-quality code and greater productivity. The four factors were:
- Motivation and self-efficacy
- Learning culture
- Support and belonging
- Agency
The Developer thriving survey was designed by the Developer Success Lab to help teams and organizations how they are performing on each of the four pillars so they can take steps to improve their culture.
As a result of this work, Flow provides you with access to a survey that measures the health of each Developer thriving pillar for both individual teams and your entire organization. This is accompanied by research-backed recommendations from the Developer Success Lab based on your survey results, as well as resources to help you learn more about how to create a healthy culture on your software development teams.
For more information on the Developer Success Lab and the Developer thriving survey, check out:
- Developer Success Lab intro video (external site, opens in new tab) and website (opens in new tab)
- Developer thriving research: comic (opens in new tab) that provides a quick overview, white paper (opens in new tab), and research paper (opens in new tab)
- Developer Success Lab's peer-reviewed scientific publication (opens in new tab) presenting the empirical evidence behind the Developer Thriving and its connection to developer productivity, published in IEEE Software
Understanding Developer thriving aggregate metrics
To view aggregate results for a survey, first select the team you want to view metrics for. If you only have permissions to view your own survey data, you must select the team you were part of when you took the survey.
Once the team is selected, you can see the start and end dates of the survey, as well as the totla response rate of the survey. This response rate is determined by the total number of available users who could have taken the survey and the total number of users who did take the survey. If the response rate is less than 65%, you'll receive a warning letting you know you have low participation and should encourage your team members to complete the next survey to get more accurate and representative results.
Tip: Try one of these recommendations to improve survey participation for your teams:
- Communicate when and how survey results will be reviewed with your teams.
- When you review survey feedback, identify at least one change your team or organization can make based on the feedback. Make the change, then make sure your team knows this change is a direct result of survey feedback. This helps your teams know their feedback leads to tangible changes.
- Keep asking for feedback on the change you've made, and adjust accordingly.
- Keep at it. Participation will increase when your teams are confident their survey feedback is being listened to and acted on.
Next, look at the aggregate survey results for each pillar. These are calculated by taking the average pillar score across all respondents for the survey. Any users who answered Prefer not to answer to more than 50% of pillar questions will not have their survey response count for that pillar.
Developer sentiment next steps
Click on each pillar's aggregate data to see more information about that pillar.
Here, you can see the aggregate data again, as well as the proportion of users who took the survey whose data is included in the aggregate score. Any user who responded Prefer not to answer to more than 50% of questions in the pillar will not have their responses included in the aggregate score.
For each pillar, see more information about how it's defined and why it matters. All users have access to th Resource tab to learn more about the pillar and the Developer thriving research to help you understand how to improve this pillar.
Users with additional survey views also have access to the Conversation starters and Survey comments tabs.
The Conversation starters tab generates recommended conversation starters for your team based on your pillar score and whether it's high, neutral, or low. Flow gives different recommendations for leaders and managers so you can tailor your conversations to your audience.
The Survey comments tab lists the comments users left for each of the questions in the pillar. Toggle between questions to see what comments were left for each one.