Welcome to the Developer Science Review!

The Developer Science Review is a collection of scholarly work curated by the Developer Success Lab. The mission of this project is to share relevant primary research with our audience of developers, to celebrate important findings from researchers in topics that benefit software teams, and to curate a semi-structured learning guide to the science of developer thriving.

We’re excited to share this project with you for two reasons. We know that science is never solitary. Scientists build on the tremendous work of other researchers across many fields, so this is a way for us to share and celebrate that work. We also know that finding scientific papers can be tough for folks who aren’t researchers and scientists, so this is a way to make impactful research more accessible. We aim to amplify the great work and authors surfacing evidence for us to use: generously sharing science benefits scientists and helps scientific work thrive!

You can think about the Developer Science Review as a shared knowledge repository that we’re building together; or a sort of syllabus that you can share and follow as a learning resource; or even an experiment in creating a non-traditional journal for a very specific audience: software practitioners. We’ll highlight important key work across developer science, of course, but we’ll also feature a broad range of work from fields that may surprise you, because they have decades of insight that we can infuse into the science of software development! Each curated article will include an annotation explaining why we think it’s relevant, helpful, thought-provoking, challenging, or just plain fun; basically, why we think you should care about it.

It’s important to know that our collection is not a scientific journal which publishes the works we feature. Rather, the Developer Science Review is what’s known as an overlay journal1. In it, we draw from many sources, including scientific journals and preprint servers. Each work that we highlight is presented with full attribution to the original authors and the original location.

Who are we, and why are we doing this? 

The Developer Success Lab is a team of social scientists and developer experience experts who want to help developers and their teams thrive. Together, we represent many years of scientific and software development experience. We’re committed to the vision of a shared developer science that uplifts teams, improves people’s lives, and helps developers feel seen, heard and appreciated.  

As a team, we conduct original empirical research into how developers work, learn, and innovate, and we share this research broadly. We commit to open science practices such as publishing our own scientific work as preprints to ensure broad access. We also create actionable toolkits and workbooks to help software developers put our research into practice.

Thank you for checking out our project!