This review proposes that the psychological affordances around developers provide a “missing layer” to developer
experience. Several examples are used to illustrate a starting place for using research on the efficacy of social-behavioral interventions in the context of software teams. The “Mindset x Context” lens can provide an important, and overlooked, entrypoint to diagnosing the problem-solving environment around software teams. Drawing from the “seed and soil” metaphor (Walton and Yeager, 2020), this review contends that workplace interventions aiming to increase developer experience will be more likely to take hold when they are congruent with the systemic social messages, opportunities and culture of the organization. mastodon 
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Further contextually relevant findings from psychological science include considering the weight of task ambiguity and evaluative ambiguity as a negative psychological affordance. Tech debt is frequently experienced by developers not only as a difficult source of friction in their day-to-day technical decision-making, but also as a source of ambiguity about what types of engineering work their organizations value (Besker et al., 2020; Lee et al., 2023). When people experience disparate and conflicting signals about what others expect of them, this often results in role ambiguity (Jackson & Schuler, 1985). Developer experience initiatives could consider how leadership can reduce role ambiguity and affirm the visibility of engineering work, as a key strategic element in a tech debt initiative. (p. 8)
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HICKS, Catherine M., 2024. Psychological Affordances Can Provide a Missing Explanatory Layer for Why Interventions to Improve Developer Experience Take Hold or Fail. 30 January 2024. DOI 10.31234/osf.io/qz43x. [Accessed 30 January 2024].
BESKER, Terese, GHANBARI, Hadi, MARTINI, Antonio and BOSCH, Jan, 2020. The influence of Technical Debt on software developer morale. Journal of Systems and Software. 2020. Vol. 167, p. 110586.