DevSAT: Google's Program for Tracking Web Developer Pain Points

Google's Web Developer Satisfaction project—known as DevSAT—is a research effort aimed at systematically collecting feedback from web developers. The program is designed to ensure that developer concerns are not only heard but also acknowledged and acted upon. The underlying objective is to align Google's Engineering and Developer Relations work with the areas developers care about most, with a long-term view of forging a web platform that is more reliable, predictable, and interoperable. The intended outcome is an ecosystem developers feel confident investing in, enabling them to adopt new features to grow both the web platform and their own businesses.

Ongoing Research

DevSAT is an ongoing effort that builds on periodic surveys and studies of developer sentiment. The cornerstone of this research includes:

Focusing on Browser Compatibility: Compat 2021

Cross-browser compatibility has long been a dominant frustration for developers. To tackle this head-on in 2021, DevSAT is coordinating an initiative known as #Compat2021. The goal is to eliminate bugs in five strategic CSS areas, creating a baseline of reliability so developers can use these features without worrying about inconsistent rendering across engines.

The dashboard tracking progress across the major browser engines, along with the linked bugs for each issue, is publicly available at wpt.fyi/compat2021.

The Five 2021 Compatibility Targets

The specific areas earmarked for fixes this year are detailed in the post Compat2021: Eliminating five top compatibility pain points on the web and include:

  • CSS Flexbox
  • CSS Grid
  • CSS position: sticky
  • CSS aspect-ratio property
  • CSS transforms

Getting Involved

For developers interested in tracking the effort or contributing, updates flow through @ChromiumDev and the Compat 2021 public mailing list. Users who encounter bugs that aren't yet on the radar can consult the guide to filing a good bug report, or use the contact channels to flag missing items.

Addressing the Testing Problem

Research from the MDN DNA assessments in both 2019 and 2020 identified testing across browsers as one of the most significant daily obstacles for developers. Google and Mozilla are collaborating on a dedicated research project to dig into this pain point. The results of that testing study are expected to be published by the end of March 2021 on the MDN insights site.

There is already concerted work happening with all browser vendors to address this area. Major effort is going into WebDriver BiDi, a new automation protocol that offers a more capable successor to existing setups. Progress is being made on integrating WebDriver BiDi into Puppeteer, which should broaden the tools' support across more browsers and platforms. This is seen as foundational to making cross-browser testing more accessible and is expected to benefit other popular testing and automation frameworks as well. Developers wishing to steer this work can participate in the W3C Browser Testing and Tools Working Group.

The DevSAT project space is active and will be updated as new initiatives unfold.