Developer Thriving: four sociocognitive factors that create resilient productivity on software teams

Software research has reliably documented a connection between how satisfied developers feel at work and their overall productivity. However, these explorations have not typically integrated known social science mechanisms around human wellbeing and achievement to describe
why
this connection exists, and what the most promising levers are for leaders and teams that wish to impact it. In addition, there are strong criticisms of using highly volatile and individual affective measures (e.g., daily happiness) as a sole signal for the quality of learning and problem-solving. In this study, we present a research-based framework for measuring successful environments on software teams for long-term and sustainable sociocognitive problem-solving, named
Developer Thriving.
Across 1282 full-time developers in 12+ industries, we tested the factors of Developer Thriving and found it predictive of developers’ self-reported productivity.