When most people picture a software developer, they imagine someone buried in code all day. Yet Atlassian’s global survey of 3,500 developers and software leaders revealed something very different.
This finding framed the conversations at Atlassian’s Developer Day in Dallas, which several of us from Thanawalla Digital had the opportunity to attend. For the DFW community, it was a welcome chance to join an event of this scale without travel. We connected with local professionals, heard directly from Atlassian leaders, and participated in sessions on both Forge and Rovo Dev: Atlassian’s newest approaches to extensibility and AI-powered development.
Developer experience is a business priority, not just a technical one.
Research insights from the field.
Atlassian’s survey painted a detailed picture of the modern developer’s work. While time spent coding was minimal, generative AI has already begun to reshape workflows. More than 80 percent of developers reported using AI tools for code generation, with many saving over ten hours a week.
Rovo and Rovo Dev.
Atlassian introduced Rovo as an AI teammate for all knowledge workers, surfacing information across Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and third-party tools. Within that, Rovo Dev is aimed specifically at software teams.
Handle repetitive tasks such as debugging, context gathering, and reviews, freeing developers to focus on higher-value work.
Explains code, generates documentation, writes tests, and assists with troubleshooting directly inside developer workflows.
Enforces standards and catches errors before teammates weigh in, reducing review cycles without replacing human judgment.
Atlassian reported that adding Rovo Dev as a reviewer improved pull request cycle times by 41 to 45 percent. The effect is not about replacing human reviewers. It is about freeing them to focus on higher-value input.
Forge in practice.
Forge is Atlassian’s cloud app development framework. It enables teams to build extensions tailored to their workflows, hosted securely by Atlassian but maintained under customer control. Benefits include faster delivery, easier maintenance, and the ability to create features without waiting for vendor updates. During an internal hackathon, Atlassian engineers built 79 Forge apps in a single week.
The strongest proof point came from T-Mobile’s migration from data center to Atlassian Cloud. With years of custom JavaScript and third-party apps that could not be carried over directly, Forge became the backbone of the transition, replicating critical business rules, enforcing field validation, and restricting bulk edits.
Why it matters.
Every point of friction delays delivery of customer value. Improving the experience around code is not a quality-of-life upgrade. It is a revenue decision.
Rovo Dev reduces the 84 percent of non-coding work that slows teams down. That is where the leverage is, not in making individual developers type faster.
Forge allows enterprises to adapt tools to their needs without waiting for vendor updates. T-Mobile’s migration showed what that capability is worth at scale.
Success is measured by how quickly value reaches customers, not by lines of code written or tickets closed.
A reflection from the team.
The Dallas event delivered more than research updates and product demos. It created space for the local community to engage directly with Atlassian’s vision of the future: one where AI and extensibility are used not to accelerate coding itself, but to remove the bottlenecks that surround it.
For our team at Thanawalla Digital, the experience underscored a simple but powerful point. If developers spend only 16 percent of their time coding, the real opportunity lies in the 84 percent. That is where the future of productivity will be won.
Build systems that remove the friction
Thanawalla Digital designs enterprise technology ecosystems where developers spend their time on work that matters. If your teams are losing hours to context switching, documentation overhead, or manual review cycles, the architecture is the answer.
Let’s talk about your developer experience