Measuring Flow, Focus, and Friction for Developers

In this article, we describe our human-centered approach to understanding flow, focus, and friction as developers experience them. We emphasized the developer’s point of view by 1) understanding developers’ subjective experiences; 2) identifying logs-based signals that most closely represent these experiences; and 3) validating our metrics against self-reported data. We hope our approach and these examples will inspire others to adopt a holistic view developer experience, one that carefully considers the human in the loop.

• Adam Brown
• Alison Chang
• Ben Holtz
• Sarah D'Angelo