Benefits of Joining and Staying in a Developer Program
More than 80 percent of developers tell Evans Data, in the Developer Relations Program Survey 2017, that they belong to one or more developer programs (free and/or paid). A majority of developers have consistently told Evans Data that they won’t use a product, service, platform, API, device, framework, library and other technologies if there isn’t an associated active developer community. The top reasons for joining and staying with a technology and a developer community are included in “The Four T’s”: technical support, technical information, training and tools. Being a part of a thriving developer community, developers tell Evans Data that there are three primary benefits that they report to their executives and managers: time saved, increased productivity and improved quality.
Time Saved
When your developer program provides great documentation, getting started guides, step by step tutorials, sample template projects, pre-built client and server libraries, videos, and code snippets programmers can save time learning your APIs, building applications and reusing code. In the Evans Data Developer Relations Survey 2017, more than three quarters of developers report that they save time because of their membership. The savings amount to being able to get more work done each week. Being able to access latest updates, bug fixes, and workarounds allows developers to avoid wasting time trying to track down a known problem. Talking with other developers in program forums and newsgroups can also save hours of wasted time that others have already incurred.
Increased Productivity
Using great tools, SDKs and content helps developers streamline their design, development, testing and deployment work. Leveraging the work done by your R&D team and developer advocates to help community members results in increased productivity for themselves and their teams. In my years of experience and with feedback from community members, it always helps to have someone show you the best practices and how to(s) for a technology allowing you to focus on what makes your solution unique to your company’s business. Copying sample code and reusing libraries and frameworks also saves time that can be used to work on other development projects.
Improved Quality
One of the best measures of developer program membership, according to developers in the recent Evans Data Developer Relations Program survey, is the improvement in the quality of their code. We know that developers write code. At the same time, developers also read code. Being a part of a developer program allows developers to avoid worst practices, talk with other developers about how to performance tune code, find and create workarounds for issues, write unit and system tests, use audits and metrics tools to identify code smells, and more. Hearing about development problems and solutions from other developers in community forums, in articles and on webinars helps another developer avoid the same problems, traps and pitfalls. Being able to access a bug tracking database on a developer program site will lead to better quality products being built by your customers and your own R&D teams.
Additional Benefits Heard from your Community Members?
Do you have additional developer benefits that you’ve heard from your developer community members? Send me an email with your list.
David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/
