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Surveys

Developer surveys provide invaluable qualitative insights into the day-to-day challenges, bottlenecks, and pain points that engineering teams face. They offer a direct channel for developers to share their experiences and suggestions, helping engineering leaders identify high-impact areas for improvement that might not be visible through quantitative metrics alone.

Create a survey​

Port provides a tailored experience for creating surveys and tracking responses directly within the solution, using self-service actions and the software catalog itself.

Alternatively, you can leverage third-party solutions for the survey front-end, and send results to Port for correlation with other catalog data.

Survey contextually​

Our most mature customers don't just poll developers periodically, they find the right moments to capture meaningful feedback from developers.

  • Ask a new developer for feedback on onboarding after they open their 10th PR.
  • Ask the incident team for feedback after an incident is complete.
  • Ask a team lead for feedback on an initiative after a service moves up a level in a scorecard.

Because Port observes and maintains a real-time audit history on your engineering data, you can leverage automations to trigger survey participation in these moments.

Promote the survey​

Don't allow surveys to become another "task" for your developers. Here are some techniques from customers who have made the sending of a survey into a more seminal moment:

  1. Ask the most senior leadership available (CEO, CTO, VP Engineering) to send out the developer survey, highlighting it's value and the cultural, process and technology changes they hope to discover and drive.
  2. Open a separate channel for unstructured, raw feedback and invite engineers to regularly share thoughts, feedback and impressions there.
  3. Drive completion of the survey with periodic reminders and later, nudges to engineering managers in charge of participants who have not yet completed it.
  4. Show back a dashboard with anonymised summaries of responses, sharing insights with the broader engineering team.
  5. Have senior engineering leaders share personal takes and insights from the survey, demonstrating engagement with the data and showing an appreciation for the time taken by their teams.

Review results​

How to turn survey pain into action​

  1. Analyze survey results: Look for patterns in the feedback. Are developers frustrated by slow CI pipelines, unclear ownership, flaky environments, or lack of documentation? Prioritize issues that are both high-impact and feasible to address.
  2. Define a scorecard: Use Port's scorecards to translate the pain point into measurable criteria. For example, if "unclear ownership" is a top complaint, create a scorecard that checks for ownership metadata on all services and components.
  3. Set up an improvement initiative: Announce the focus area to the team, explain why it was chosen, and outline the steps you will take to address it. Make the initiative visible—track progress in Port, share updates, and celebrate wins as improvements are made.
Example: Turning survey feedback into a scorecard

If your survey reveals that developers struggle to find the right code owners for services, create a "Ownership Clarity" scorecard. This scorecard could check that every service in your catalog has an assigned owner, and that ownership information is up to date.

By focusing on one pain point at a time and making progress visible, you build momentum for continuous improvement and show the team that their feedback leads to real change.