Psychological Affordances Can Provide a Missing Explanatory Layer for Why Interventions to Improve Developer Experience Take Hold or Fail
Catherine M. Hicks · 2024
This review proposes that the psychological affordances around developers provide a "missing layer" to developerexperience. Several examples are used to illustrate a starting place for using research on the efficacy of social-behavioral interventions in the context of software teams. The “Mindset x Context” lens can provide an important, and overlooked, entrypoint to diagnosing the problem-solving environment around software teams. Drawing from the "seed and soil" metaphor (Walton and Yeager, 2020), this review contends that workplace interventions aiming to increase developer experience will be more likely to take hold when they are congruent with the systemic social messages, opportunities and culture of the organization.