Why DevEx Is Becoming the Foundation of Platform Engineering

The Evolution of Developer Experience (DevEx)

Developer Experience (DevEx) refers to the overall journey and satisfaction of software developers as they build, ship, and run applications. It encompasses everything from the tools and frameworks developers use to the processes and culture of the engineering organization. In essence, DevEx is about empowering developers, creating an environment for them to innovate, and removing friction from their daily work. This concept has evolved over time: historically, teams focused on DevOps and automation to speed up delivery, but today there’s a growing recognition that simply shipping faster isn’t enough. The key is how developers feel and perform during that process.

Why does DevEx matter so much? Research shows a strong link between great developer experience and better business outcomes. For instance, McKinsey’s multi-year study introduced the Developer Velocity Index (DVI) to measure factors like tools, culture, and enablement. The results were striking – companies scoring in the top quartile of DVI grew revenues 4–5 times faster than those in the bottom quartile. They also outperformed on innovation, customer satisfaction, and talent retention. The takeaway is clear: when developers are equipped with excellent platforms and minimal hurdles, their productivity soars and so does the company’s performance. DevEx has evolved from a niche concern to a strategic priority, becoming the foundation on which modern engineering excellence is built.

The Cost of Poor DevEx in Internal Platforms

On the flip side, a poorly designed internal platform can be a developer’s nightmare. Engineers often face fragmented toolchains, opaque processes, and manual gates that sap their productivity. A common scenario in organizations with low DevEx is that developers spend more time wrestling with infrastructure and waiting on other teams than writing code. In fact, industry observers note that too much time spent in these “outer-loop” tasks – such as configuring environments, fixing pipeline issues, or waiting for approvals – is a symptom of underlying issues. It’s not unusual to see engineers stuck in “holding patterns where developers are waiting on another colleague or team”, rather than coding. Top tech companies counter this by aiming for developers to spend ~70% of their time on core coding and inner-loop activities, highlighting just how much waste poor DevEx can introduce.

Several pain points arise when internal platforms don’t put developers first:

• Excess Cognitive Load: Modern cloud setups often require developers to understand a dizzying array of tools and infrastructure details. When each project demands navigating different scripts, configs, and deployment steps, the mental burden skyrockets. The push to “shift left” has inadvertently added complexity to developers’ plates – they must now consider infrastructure, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and more. This cognitive load not only slows development but can hurt morale.

  
  

• Manual, Repetitive Tasks: Without adequate automation, developers end up doing the same tedious steps over and over. Manually provisioning environments, running quality checks, or managing release processes by hand leads to frustration. Every minute spent on yak-shaving (trivial setup work) is a minute not spent delivering value. A lack of self-service capabilities forces developers to file tickets and wait for others to do these tasks, stretching lead times and causing context-switching.

  
  

• Outdated Tooling and Friction: Legacy CI/CD tools or homegrown scripts can be brittle and high-maintenance. Teams using older platforms (think traditional CI servers or ad-hoc deployment scripts) often report spending inordinate effort just keeping the lights on. As one engineering article notes, with such setups “instead of focusing on innovation, DevOps teams often find themselves playing catch-up, trying to ensure their pipelines remain operational”. This firefighting mode is a direct outcome of poor DevEx – developers are bogged down by tooling friction rather than enabled by it.

  
  

The cost of these challenges isn’t just developer angst. It translates to slower delivery, higher chance of errors (since manual steps are error-prone), and even talent attrition as frustrated developers seek more supportive environments. Recognizing these pitfalls sets the stage for why modern organizations are rethinking their approach to internal platforms altogether.

Platform Engineering 2.0: Built Around DevEx

Platform Engineering has emerged as the answer to these challenges, by creating paved roads that make developers’ lives easier. In its essence, platform engineering is about treating the internal platform as a product for developers – with the platform team acting as the “product team” and developers as the customers.

This approach means understanding developer needs, providing easy-to-use tools and interfaces, and continuously improving the platform based on feedback. In fact, a new breed of roles is appearing in organizations: DevEx Platform Engineers, who advocate for developers and shape the platform with a human-centric mindset. They apply product management principles internally, crafting intuitive workflows and smoothing rough edges in the development process. Often considered the cultural core of platform engineering, these DevEx champions focus on creating “golden paths” that guide developers along the simplest, most supported way to build and deploy software.

What do DevEx-centric platforms look like in practice? A few emerging patterns illustrate this shift:

• Golden Paths and Paved Roads: A “golden path” is an opinionated, well-documented way to go from idea to production with minimal hassle. Instead of every team inventing their own pipeline or setup, the platform provides a pre-approved path with all the best practices baked in. For example, if a developer wants to create a new microservice, there might be a template or service blueprint that sets up everything (repo, CI pipeline, cloud infrastructure, monitoring) in one go. This reduces choice paralysis and ensures devs aren’t stuck figuring out integration bits. By provisioning a pre-configured Internal Developer Platform (IDP) and delineating a clear golden path, platform engineering addresses complexity and skill gaps in traditional setups. Developers can follow the paved road and know that security, compliance, and scalability are handled, freeing them to focus on business logic.

  
  

• Self-Service Portals and Service Catalogs: Modern platform teams provide self-service interfaces – essentially internal developer portals – where engineers can discover and access the tools and services they need on demand. Instead of filing a ticket for a database, a developer might go to a portal and click “Provision dev database” which triggers an automated workflow. Companies like Spotify and Expedia popularized this approach with portals (e.g. Spotify’s Backstage) that act as a one-stop shop for developers. The goal is to eliminate waiting and hand-offs: spin up environments, deploy apps, check logs or metrics – all with self-service. As these portals mature, there’s a big emphasis on making them user-friendly. In fact, recent industry trends note that service catalog tools (like Backstage or its commercial alternatives) must become more user-friendly as they are increasingly the critical interface of the IDP. A slick developer portal with clear documentation and easy workflows becomes the “front door” to the platform, greatly enhancing DevEx.

  
  

• Infrastructure Abstraction: Platform engineering also works to hide the unnecessary complexity of infrastructure from developers. Not every engineer should need to be a Kubernetes or cloud expert to ship software. Techniques like container orchestration, Functions-as-a-Service, or simpler deployment frameworks provide a layer of abstraction. The platform might manage Kubernetes, for example, but developers just supply a container and some config – the platform handles the rest. The idea is to reduce the cognitive load on developers by abstracting away low-level details (networking, cluster management, etc.) and presenting higher-level capabilities. This ties back to the earlier point: less mental overhead means developers can spend more energy on features and innovation. A focused platform team can codify best practices (security, scaling, deployment strategies) so that each developer doesn’t have to reinvent them for every project. The result is consistency across teams and a significant boost in productivity and reliability.

  
  

Crucially, organizations investing in platform engineering are also fostering a culture of continuous improvement. They measure developer satisfaction, collect feedback on what hurts or slows down engineers, and iterate on the platform. Many are creating dedicated platform teams whose sole mission is to enhance DevEx by providing reusable services and tooling across the org. All these efforts underscore a clear industry direction: the next generation of platform engineering is dev-centric. In other words, DevEx isn’t just an afterthought – it’s the foundation and North Star for how internal platforms are built and run.

Avyka’s Insights: How to Systematically Improve DevEx

Improving DevEx doesn’t happen by accident – it requires a deliberate, systematic approach. This is where insights from practitioners like Avyka come into play. Avyka, a DevOps and platform engineering consultancy, specializes in helping companies revamp their software delivery with developer experience in mind. From their experience, the most successful organizations take a holistic approach that spans people, process, and technology. Here are a few strategies, drawn from Avyka’s perspective, for systematically elevating DevEx:

• Automate Repetitive Toil: Automation is often the first quick win for better DevEx. Every manual, repetitive task in the development lifecycle is a candidate for scripting or tooling. Avyka emphasizes that by automating tedious manual steps, teams can eliminate bottlenecks and free developers to focus on creative work. Even simple steps – like automatically running tests, deployments, or environment setups – can make a huge difference. The payoff of such automation is explicitly a “better developer experience by eliminating repetitive manual tasks”. For example, implementing GitOps (managing infrastructure and deployments via Git) can ensure deployments happen with a git commit rather than a manual push, increasing consistency and reducing errors. The bottom line: automation not only speeds up delivery, it significantly reduces frustration.

  
  

• Adopt Next-Gen Platform Tools: Modern problems need modern tools. Legacy CI/CD or config management systems often struggle to meet today’s demands at scale. Avyka guides organizations in adopting next-generation platforms – for instance, the Harness software delivery platform – to modernize their internal developer platform. Tools like Harness are designed to “eliminate complexity, automate the mundane, and give teams the power to deploy and manage pipelines with far less friction”. In practical terms, this means a more intuitive UI for developers, built-in capabilities like continuous integration, continuous delivery, feature flags, and robust security and compliance features out-of-the-box. By moving to such integrated platforms, companies can drastically cut down the home-grown scripts and plugins that developers used to wrestle with. The result is a smoother path to production – fewer moving parts to manage and a single pane of glass for the software delivery process.

  
  

• Embed Security and Quality Early (DevSecOps): A key aspect of developer experience is confidence – confidence that the code they write won’t break in production or violate policies. A platform that bakes in security scanning, testing, and compliance checks as automated steps helps build that confidence. Avyka’s approach to DevEx includes integrating DevSecOps practices into the platform by default. For example, if every deployment automatically runs security tests or checks for known vulnerabilities, developers don’t have to manually coordinate those checks. It’s about shifting left in a way that doesn’t add extra burden on engineers. When the platform handles it, developers appreciate the safety net without feeling slowed down. This systematic integration of quality gates improves DevEx because it reduces the firefighting and retrofitting later on.

  
  

• Treat the Platform as a Product: As mentioned, the cultural shift is as important as the tech. Avyka advises companies to treat their internal platform like a product – complete with roadmaps, developer feedback sessions, and continuous improvements. This might involve surveying developers regularly or establishing an internal Developer Experience group that advocates for engineer needs. The platform team should have a clear mandate to gather requirements from dev teams, prioritize features (like new self-service capabilities or template projects), and communicate updates. By instilling this product mindset, improvements to DevEx become proactive and aligned with what developers actually need, rather than top-down guesses. Avyka’s own methodology often includes workshops with engineering teams to map out developer journey pain points and identify quick wins. Over time, this ensures the platform evolves in lockstep with the development teams.

  
  

The overarching insight from Avyka is that improving DevEx is a continuous journey, not a one-time fix. It requires executive support and cross-functional effort. Companies that succeed tend to measure where they are (through DevEx surveys or metrics), take iterative steps (perhaps starting with one team or project as a pilot), and scale the successful patterns organization-wide. With the right expertise and focus, any organization can turn their internal platform into a competitive advantage – one that attracts top engineering talent and lets them deliver their best work with delight instead of drudgery.

Key Takeaways and Call to Action for Engineering Leaders

As platform engineering increasingly centers on DevEx, a few clear takeaways emerge for technology leaders:

• Developer Experience is Mission-Critical: Far from being a “nice-to-have,” DevEx directly impacts productivity, quality, and the business’s bottom line. Happy, productive developers build better software faster. Neglecting DevEx means risking slower delivery and even losing talent to more developer-friendly workplaces. Leadership should treat DevEx metrics (such as developer satisfaction, lead time, deployment pain) as key performance indicators, on par with operational metrics. Remember that top-performing companies excel at DevEx and reap outsized benefits.

  
  

• Friction is the Enemy – Seek it Out: Make it a habit to identify what frustrates your developers. Is it slow build times? Clunky approval processes? Inconsistent environments? Once you shine a light on pain points, invest in removing them. Even small improvements (like a faster test suite or a one-click deploy script) can compound into significant gains. Engineering leaders should foster a culture where developers feel safe voicing frustrations and ideas for improvement.

  
  

• Platform Engineering is a Team Sport: If you haven’t already, consider forming a dedicated platform team or DevEx task force. Give them a clear mandate: make our developers’ lives better. This team can own building the internal developer platform, maintaining the golden paths, and ensuring documentation is up-to-date. Crucially, they should engage closely with application teams – effectively acting as internal consultants or product managers for the platform. As the platform team iterates, encourage the adoption of self-service and standardization across all dev teams. The payoff will be greater consistency and velocity organization-wide.

  
  

• Leverage Modern Tools and Expertise: Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to. Today there’s a rich ecosystem of platform engineering tools (from CI/CD platforms to Infrastructure as Code, service catalogs, etc.) that can accelerate your DevEx improvements. Evaluate which tools fit your context and bring them in strategically – whether it’s an internal portal, a deployment automation tool, or AI-powered coding assistants. Additionally, consider tapping external expertise or partners to jumpstart your DevEx initiatives. For example, engaging specialist firms (like Avyka) that focus on DevOps and platform enablement can bring valuable frameworks and experience to your transformation, ensuring you avoid pitfalls and implement best practices from day one.

  
  

Engineering leaders must champion Developer Experience as a first-class priority. Start by assessing your current state – gather feedback from your developers and measure baseline metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, developer satisfaction, etc.). Then, formulate a clear DevEx improvement roadmap: identify quick wins (perhaps automating a painful manual process) and longer-term goals (like building an integrated developer portal or migrating to a modern CI/CD platform). Importantly, secure buy-in across the organization by communicating the “why” – explain to stakeholders how these investments will reduce time-to-market, improve reliability, and drive innovation. Finally, execute iteratively and keep the feedback loops open. Celebrate early wins (e.g., “we cut environment setup time from 3 days to 3 hours”) to build momentum. By systematically removing friction and empowering your engineers, you’ll not only enhance productivity but also set your organization up to attract and retain top talent.

The writing is on the wall: developer experience is the foundation of great software companies. Those who recognize this and act decisively will build engineering cultures that excel at delivering value. It’s time to pave the golden paths, equip your teams with the best tools, and watch innovation flourish. As you embark on this journey, keep asking: “How can we make life better for our developers?” – the answers will guide you to engineering excellence and business success in the digital age.