DX Snapshots: Just a survey?

Research proves that measuring and improving developer productivity requires qualitative data about developer experience – genuine insights gathered directly from developers themselves. At DX, we pioneered the first DevEx survey product—DX Snapshots—and we continue to lead as this approach becomes the industry standard.

However, we hear comments like, “Aren’t DX Snapshots just a survey?” or, “Our developers won’t take a survey.” Some teams even say, “We’ve built our own DevEx survey, and it’s working fine.”

These perspectives are understandable. Surveys range from brief two-question forms to lengthy HR evaluations, leaving participants with mixed impressions of their ease and worth. The truth is running a survey program that consistently delivers business value —especially on a complex topic across hundreds or thousands of engineers—is very difficult. In fact, every homegrown DevEx survey we’ve come across (and we’ve seen many) falls short of what our customers are able to achieve with DX Snapshots.

This article covers two themes: why DX delivers the industry’s best DevEx survey, and how we go beyond that to make analyzing, sharing, and acting on insights seamless.

Why DX Snapshots are the standard for measuring developer experience

Research-backed design

DX is a research-first company, which means the design, content, and delivery of our surveys have been vetted by leaders in the field. Our team includes leaders like Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey who created the DORA and SPACE frameworks. Together we’ve pioneered leading research and definitions about developer experience. And we’ve integrated these learnings directly into our product with a proprietary measure called the Developer Experience Index (DXI).

The DXI provides a composite score of engineering performance drivers. This makes it thorough, yet easy to understand and track. What’s more is that it’s designed to predict the financial impact of these engineering performance drivers, tying it directly to business value. The DXI was developed through years of research and guided by SIOP principles (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology), ensuring every element is rigorously tested and linked to real business outcomes.

The result is a survey that’s designed to capture the highest quality DevEx data possible with every snapshot. However, as with any survey, data integrity rests on participation.

90%+ participation rates

In homegrown DevEx surveys, participation typically falls below 50%, with many organizations seeing less than 25% on average. This is a huge problem. At these levels, the data often reflects only extreme views, lacks depth for meaningful segmentation, and fails to gain traction with executives. This undermines the program’s credibility and eventually threatens its long-term sustainability.

DX consistently delivers an industry-leading average participation rate of 96%, quarter after quarter. This has a foundational impact on the DevEx program. Senior leaders act quickly on trusted insights, frontline teams see value as it reflects their entire group, and the data is easily segmented for actionable insights by role. It also boosts the program’s credibility, making it sustainable and increasingly valuable over time.

Here’s how we consistently achieve such high levels of participation:

Best-in-class survey design and content – We deeply understand the work developers do and the challenges they face.
A personalized approach – Surveys are delivered in tools like Slack, making it feel like a natural part of a developer’s workflow.
Prompt and transparent delivery of results – We ensure that data isn’t just delivered to leadership but is shared with everyone. Teams can drill down into the specifics of their role, project, or squad as soon as the snapshot closes.

Tesco, one of the world’s leading retailers, saw their participation rates drastically improve to 92% within just two quarters of using DX, giving them reliable data for team-level insights they had never been able to gather before.

Designing a great DevEx survey program with participation consistently above 90% eludes even the biggest and most successful technology companies in the world. And even then it’s not enough to have great data. To actually improve how developers get work done you have to drive understanding and change. Here are the ways DX builds on the foundational data our surveys provide to help people analyze, share, and act on insights.

Making data transparent and actionable

DX streamlines the entire post-survey process. All data processing and report building (a huge lift) are done automatically by the platform, delivering an organized view of all your DevEx data in a beautiful interface. Executives, engineering leaders, and individual contributors can explore, drill into specifics, and identify trends to inform decisions—all with zero manual effort. And if you want to build custom reports from SQL we enable that in our AI assisted Data Studio.

Transparency is central to DX’s approach, which is why we provide self-serve access to all teams. This allows insights to be shared across the organization, keeping participation rates high and driving continuous improvement. Teams that see and understand the value of their data stay engaged over time, while leaders gain a clear, unified view of team productivity, with actionable insights to drive meaningful change.

Proprietary benchmarks

DX provides proprietary benchmarks based on data spanning 500+ companies. Benchmarks do the important work of contextualizing your data. In a vacuum, you might think that documentation or tech debt are fires, and they might be, but benchmarks reveal if that problem is unique to you or common across peer companies. How much room is there really to improve? Investing in areas with clear gaps relative to your peer group might yield a higher return, whereas investments into areas where most struggle might be tougher to generate large returns (i.e. no one is really exceptional at this). Without benchmarks, it’s difficult to know if your team’s performance is average or exceptional, and DX has the largest DevEx benchmark dataset in the industry.

Expertise and support

Building a successful DevEx program requires more than tools—it takes effective communication and change management. DX provides both the platform and the expertise to help you achieve these objectives.

We offer tailored executive summaries and benchmarking reports to give leaders a clear understanding of where your company stands and what actions to take. Our enablement and internal comms templates facilitate sharing of insights across engineering, DevEx, and product teams so everyone stays aligned. We also provide a library of research-based guides and best practices, called Atlas. This editable wiki that lives in the platform centralizes leading DevEx research, enabling customers to stay informed and apply the best ideas to their specific challenges.

With DX, you’re backed by a team of experts who have guided numerous organizations through this process, delivering measurable, lasting results.

Bridging qualitative and quantitative data

Survey data is powerful, but it’s only part of the picture. DX bridges the gap by integrating qualitative data from surveys with quantitative data from systems like GitHub. We also use a research-backed technique called data bridging, where subjective answers help reveal objective metrics—such as developer satisfaction linked to code review times. This method captures signals that would take much longer to surface through system data alone. Altogether, DX delivers the most complete view of developer experience available.

We make this actionable with Correlations, a feature that allows users to select any two metrics—from surveys or systems—and generate a correlation matrix. System data needs context, and survey data needs validation. By combining both, you can drill into problem areas and uncover the underlying relationships.

Companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Meta have spent years and millions to achieve this level of data integration. DX helps you get there in weeks

More than a survey

Are DX Snapshots just surveys? Not exactly. The surveys themselves are foundational, providing high-quality data you can’t do without. But to drive improvements in developer productivity, experience, and ultimately business outcomes, you need the platform behind it. DX transforms your data into a complete DevEx program, equipping engineering leaders, platform teams, and executives with the tools and insights they need to create real improvements.

If you’re ready to see for yourself, you can try DX Snapshots at no cost.

Schedule time with our team and see how DX can transform your engineering organization.

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