Improving and Measuring Developer Experience with Backstage

What is Developer Experience?

Developer Experience (DX) refers to the tools, systems, and culture that impact how developers work. It reflects how efficiently developers can do their best work without frustration or impediment, and as such, DX is strongly associated with high-performing teams that deliver impactful, value-creating software. When building software, the highest cost is almost always engineering time, so it make sense to optimize for developer efficiency and productivity.

The benefits of improved DevEx: https://newsletter.getdx.com/p/impact-of-developer-experience

As organizations grow, developer experience often suffers due to increased friction, formal processes, and fragmented knowledge, which hampers productivity and collaboration. Informal communication channels that once worked well in small teams become ineffective, and developers struggle to find information or navigate complex systems - a sort of software development Dunbar’s Number . Maintaining a strong DX requires proactive strategies and consistent adaptation to evolving team sizes, ensuring that workflows remain efficient and developers stay engaged and motivated.

How to Improve Developer Experience with Backstage

How can large software organizations deliver a great DX? Improving DX typically involves addressing core challenges that hinder efficiency as organizations scale, many of which can be resolved by using an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) like Backstage:

Discoverability of Services and Information

As organizations grow, developers often struggle to find services, APIs, and documentation. A developer might spend hours searching for documentation or rebuilding a service simply because they can’t locate what they need.

How Backstage Solves This:

The Backstage Service Catalog centralizes services, APIs, documentation, and ownership, making it easy for developers to find what they need, see dependencies, and know who to contact - eliminating wasted time. TechDocs, a core feature of Backstage, makes internal documentation easily accessible and up-to-date by storing it alongside the code itself. This centralization reduces friction and boosts productivity by providing a single interface for all documentation needs.

A typical Backstage software catalog

Quality and Speed of Releases

In software delivery, pace and consistency are critical. Fragmented workflows and inconsistent CI/CD pipelines can lead to uncertainty and delays, slowing down releases and increasing errors.

How Backstage Solves This:

Backstage templates standardize releases by automating workflows and enforcing best practices. By integrating with tools like GitHub, Backstage ensures a consistent, transparent software delivery process, reducing friction and increasing developer confidence.

Self-Service Capabilities and Workflow Simplification

In larger organizations, developers often depend on other teams for tools and approval, which can cause delays and frustration. Self-service tooling helps developers maintain momentum without waiting for approvals.

How Backstage Solves This:

Backstage enables developers to self-provision resources, deploy services, and configure environments through integrations with cloud providers like AWS or Kubernetes - removing bottlenecks and keeping developers focused on coding.

A collection of software templates that automate common workflows - everything from creating new customer environments to opening a new PR to add software into a Backstage software catalog.

Governance, Standards Adherence, and Complexity Management

As organizations grow, maintaining governance and ensuring adherence to standards becomes challenging. Over time, undocumented services and lack of enforced policies lead to vulnerabilities, with leadership often lacking visibility into best practice adherence.

How Backstage Solves This:

Backstage’s Tech Insights plugin enforces governance by setting up custom checks to monitor security, testing, and compliance, helping teams ensure their services meet internal standards and guidelines. Developers use Tech Insights to address gaps, while leadership tracks governance adherence, providing a unified view of service health and managing complexity as the organization scales.

Tech Insights scorecard showing adherence of the organization to Backstage component best practices over time

How to Track and Measure DX

Implementing an IDP like Backstage is an important first step to improving developer experience, and helps address some of the more obvious impediments to DX. The crucial next step is understanding how to track DX and measure it. This is especially true as your organization grows, so do its complexities. Continuous feedback from tools that track DX are critical to ensure that you’re always ahead of potential bottlenecks or compliance gaps. Measuring DX can take many forms. There are two main approaches to consider depending on your organization’s needs and existing tools.

Approach 1: Aggregate DX Metrics in a Third-Party Tool

One approach is to use specialized third-party tools to collect DX metrics and then surface those insights within Backstage. Tools like getdx.com and open-source DORA plugins are specifically designed to aggregate developer productivity data. They track metrics like cycle time, lead time for changes, and deployment frequency, and then present the results in a dashboard format.

OpenDORA courtesy of https://nl.devoteam.com/expert-view/introducing-opendora-team-performance-observability-for-your-organization/

For example, you could integrate a DX Plugin that aggregates productivity metrics from across your CI/CD systems and other development tools. These metrics could then be displayed in Backstage, where developers can easily see how well they’re performing against industry benchmarks. Metrics like DORA (Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Mean Time To Recovery, and Change Failure Rate) are especially valuable for tracking operational efficiency and developer productivity.

This approach uses specialized tools for deeper analytics while keeping insights in Backstage, minimizing context-switching.

Approach 2: Aggregate Metrics Directly in Backstage with Tech Insights

Alternatively, you can collect and track DX metrics natively within Backstage using the Tech Insights plugin. Tech Insights enables you to define and track custom checks and metrics, giving you full control over what data you collect and how it’s presented. This approach allows you to integrate metrics from your existing systems (like GitHub or monitoring tools) and aggregate them in Backstage, providing a centralized view of DX without relying on third-party dashboards.

Using Roadie’s Tech Insights plugin, you can create scorecards that track various metrics related to DX. For instance, you could monitor the percentage of services adhering to security policies, the number of projects using automated testing, or DORA metrics - all from within Backstage itself. Scorecards can also be viewed for each individual team - so with this data, those teams can quickly identify areas of improvement, measure changes, and identify focus areas to optimize DX.

This approach centralizes everything in Backstage, allowing for more tailored metrics and scorecards based on your organization’s needs while reducing context-switching for developers.

Tech Insights scorecards on a Team page in Backstage

The right DX tracking approach depends on your organization’s goals, tools, and the complexity of your developer workflows. Whether you aggregate metrics in a third-party tool and display them in Backstage or centralize everything within Backstage using Tech Insights, the key is making DX measurable and visible to all stakeholders. A strong developer experience is about tracking, iterating, and improving workflows while providing transparency and actionable insights.

Image by GrumpyBeere from Pixabay