Here is the 3 of the resources that developers turn to, when they have questions that require immediate assistance:

Service Now, Ms Teams Channel, and Right Anwers (internal tool at Allstate)

Interviews

I recently chatted with senior developers at Allstate.

They’re quite skilled and prefer to handle things themselves. They don’t trust the value of certain tools provided, even if they work well. If they try a tool and it doesn’t meet their expectations, they’re done with it!

Key Research Decisions and Outcomes

• Target Participant Selection

• Through preliminary discussions and alignment with stakeholder and business objectives, the target demographic was precisely defined.
  

• Goal: Recruit mid-level developers with 3 to 5 years of experience as they are the primary users responsible for code development and tool integration.
  

• Interview Protocol Design

• The semi-structured interview guide was crafted to investigate critical pain points within the daily workflow.
  

• Key Questions Focused On:

• The step-by-step process required for accessing internal development tools.
  

• Identifying the primary time sinks during code production.
  

• Understanding the approach and resources utilized for code issue resolution.
  

• Inventorying the most frequently used and desired development tools.
  

• Core Research Insights

• High Friction in Issue Resolution: Developers often encounter multiple, sequential steps to fix code, leading them to outsource solutions (e.g., using Stack Overflow) instead of relying solely on internal resources.
  

• Significant Time Loss: Participants reported spending hours, sometimes days, attempting to locate necessary internal documentation and resources, often resulting in a reliance on external communities or other workarounds.
  

• Actionable Next Steps

• The discovered insights revealed substantial systemic friction impacting the developers' daily flow. Crucially, the exact location and context of these issues were not yet defined.
  

• Proposal: I recommended and initiated a subsequent Usability Testing phase across the system. This approach was chosen as the fastest and most intuitive method to observe, in real-time, the specific friction points and mandatory steps that mid-level developers must navigate.

What I Learned:

• What are the tools available for developers to fix code?

• What kind of service these tools provides?

• What steps developers need to follow?

Insights:

• Service Now:

• ( No searchable, no discovery solutions, no engaged with community , no trackable in terms of saving documents)

  A tool where developers summit tickets relate about issues with the code, developers have to wait until someone get the ticket and responded to them. ( these process can take days or weeks)

• Looking deeply into Service Now, we learned about tickets abandoned or never resolved. (wrong cube / lack of information provided.)

• Right Answers

• Does not have an ability to search by criteria, low data metrics, no discoverable, no engaged with community.

  ( library documentation ) this tool was created to simplify steps to fix code in production. any developer at Allstate is able to source throw the libraries and find ways to fix code.

  (Perhaps in Usability Testing we found that the libraries contain old documentation mixed with new documentation,( no one maintain libraries, no one knew who write it or understand if these documentation is accurate for developers.)

• Microsoft Teams:

  Is been used as a community Channel where developers can chat in real life with other peers findings accurate results. in minutes

  Perhaps since is a community can be hard to get hold of someone free to chat about the issues.