  New ways of working such as globally distributed development or the
integration of self-motivated external developers into software ecosystems will
require a better and more comprehensive understanding of developers' feelings,
perceptions, motivations and identification with their tasks in their
respective project environments. User experience is a concept that captures how
persons feel about products, systems and services. It evolved from disciplines
such as interaction design and usability to a much richer scope that includes
feelings, motivations, and satisfaction. Similarly, developer experience could
be defined as a means for capturing how developers think and feel about their
activities within their working environments, with the assumption that an
improvement of the developer experience has positive impacts on characteristics
such as sustained team and project performance. This article motivates the
importance of developer experience, sketches related approaches from other
domains, proposes a definition of developer experience that is derived from
similar concepts in other domains, describes an ongoing empirical study to
better understand developer experience, and finally gives an outlook on planned
future research activities.
