Developer Toolchain & Setup Experience Survey

Welcome to the Developer Toolchain & Setup Experience Survey. This survey explores your experience setting up projects, using development tools, and maintaining productivity. Your responses will help identify friction points and inform tooling improvements. There are no right or wrong answers—we're interested in your honest experience. Your responses are confidential and will be reported only in aggregate. Participation is voluntary and you may stop at any time. Estimated time: 7–10 minutes.

Which code editor or IDE do you primarily use?

• VS Code
• JetBrains IDE (e.g., IntelliJ, PyCharm)
• Visual Studio
• Vim/Neovim
• Emacs
• Xcode
• Eclipse
• Other

In the past 3 months, approximately how many new projects have you set up from scratch?

• None
• 1
• 2 to 3
• 4 or more

Overall, how would you rate the ease of use and comfort of your current development tools?

In the past 14 days, how often did your development tools help you stay in a state of flow?

If you could make one change to your development setup or tooling, what would most improve your day-to-day productivity?

Which role best describes your current work?

• Backend engineer
• Frontend engineer
• Full-stack engineer
• Mobile developer
• Data/ML engineer
• DevOps/SRE/Platform
• QA/Testing
• Student
• Other

Thank you for completing this survey! Your responses will help improve developer tooling and onboarding experiences. If you have any questions, please contact the research team.

For your most recent new project, approximately how long did the end-to-end setup take?

• Less than 15 minutes
• 15–30 minutes
• 31–60 minutes
• 1–2 hours
• 2–4 hours
• More than 4 hours
• I don't recall

To what extent do you agree: My development tools integrate well with each other.

Overall, how has your current toolchain affected your speed on routine development tasks?

We'd like to learn more about your experience with developer tools. An AI moderator will ask a couple of follow-up questions based on your earlier responses.

How many years of professional software development experience do you have?

• Less than 1
• 1–3
• 4–6
• 7–10
• 11+

How difficult was cloning or downloading the project source?

To what extent do you agree: Keyboard shortcuts and navigation in my tools feel intuitive.

Thinking about the past 30 days, rank the following from your biggest productivity bottleneck (1) to smallest (6).

1. Slow builds or installs
2. Flaky tests
3. IDE/editor lag or crashes
4. Unclear or noisy tool feedback
5. Context switching between tools
6. Dependency resolution issues

What is your primary operating system for development?

• Windows
• macOS
• Linux
• Other

How difficult was installing dependencies and packages?

To what extent do you agree: Error messages and feedback from my tools are clear and actionable.

How likely are you to recommend your current development toolchain to a colleague?

Which best describes your current employment status?

• Full-time employee
• Part-time employee
• Contractor/Freelancer
• Student
• Not currently employed

How difficult was configuring environment variables or credentials?

To what extent do you agree: Customizing my tools to fit my workflow is straightforward.

Approximately how many employees work at your current organization?

• Just me
• 2–9
• 10–49
• 50–249
• 250–999
• 1,000+
• Not applicable

How difficult was connecting to databases or external services?

Which region are you primarily based in?

• Africa
• Asia
• Europe
• Latin America
• North America
• Oceania
• Prefer not to say

How difficult was running the first successful build?

How difficult was getting the test suite to pass?

Which of the following blockers, if any, did you encounter during your most recent project setup? Select all that apply.

• Unclear or outdated documentation
• Version conflicts or incompatibilities
• Access permissions or credentials issues
• Slow package downloads or installs
• Flaky or non-reproducible setup scripts
• OS-specific issues
• Corporate network or proxy constraints
• Large repository or asset downloads
• Hardware or architecture differences
• None of the above