Mar 28, 2023 2 min read

How to perform a Developer audit

Using data as a part of your developer retention strategy

A developer audit is the act of examining your development team as individuals and assigning a score out of 10 on how likely they are to leave your company and why. This enables the company to either put preventative measures in place to secure that developer or to put a contingency plan in place should the developer leave.

Consistently performing developer audits enables the company to note changes in the developers’ immediate surroundings whether it is at work or whether it is at home. This can obviously work for any employee but it is important specifically for software developers as they are a scarce resource in a highly competitive industry.

Step 1.

The first step in performing a developer audit is to understand what function every developer fulfils and to rate their importance within the organisation. This step is vital to knowing who is worth retaining and why. It will also highlight any key-person dependency where the company relies too heavily on the knowledge or ability of one person which poses a large problem to the business should that one person resign.

Step 2.

Write out a series of questions based on their personal and work life. These questions need to be centred around the developer and the company policies. For example if your company does not offer remote/hybrid working and a developer is moving further away from the office, that poses the risk that another company that is based closer to his/her home or completely remote, might be able to tempt the developer to leave your company.

By understanding the developers personal life you will be able to predict their future needs and develop a way of supporting the changes as they happen instead of it being too late.

Step 3.

Gather all the information and assign a risk value to each developer. If the developer sits in traffic for 2 hours every day, then the risk value will be high. Comb through each developers profile and see if there is a common thread in your high risk value developers and try create a strategy to reduce that risk. You will never be able to eliminate the risk, but you can certainly work on reducing the risk especially amongst the members of the team that add tremendous value to the business.