Span DX Surveys: Complete Guide

Span surveys collect developer experience feedback from your engineers and show it next to your delivery data. This guide covers the survey types, how to create and send a survey, anonymity, and how to read the results.

Why it matters

• Structured measurement: start from a ready-made DevEx question bank of 30 questions across 18 themes, or write your own.

• Clear priorities: theme voting shows which areas engineers most want fixed.

• Benchmarks: compare results with Span's Q4 2024 benchmark, your whole organization, or your earlier surveys.

• Connected to your metrics: filter metric reports to the people who rated a theme low or high, and check whether a complaint shows up in the work (Transparent surveys).

• AI summaries: once a survey closes, Span writes an executive summary of the findings.

How it works

Survey types. Open Insights → Sentiment and click Create survey. Pick one:

DevEx themes. The DevEx template has 30 rating questions across 18 themes: Deep Work, On-call Experience, Tech Debt Prioritization, Workload, Local Development, Documentation, Testing, Code Quality, Collaboration & Communication, Observability, Operational Excellence, Efficiency, Code Review, Strategic Planning, Requirements, Ease of Release, Allocation, and AI Transformation. You can add custom themes and questions.

Question types.

• Rating questions on a 1 to 5 scale, with seven scales: Agreement, Satisfaction, Quality, Ease, Frequency, Amount, and Enthusiasm.

• Multiple-choice questions, single or multi-select.

• Free-text questions.

Anonymity. Each survey is one of two modes, chosen in the Settings step:

• Transparent (marked Recommended): names are visible on every answer and comment. You see results as they come in, can follow up with people, and can filter metric reports by how people answered.

• Anonymous: Span hides who said what. A survey needs at least 4 participants to launch, and Span shows results only after at least 4 people respond in the slice you're viewing. Comments show no author or timestamp.

Lifecycle. A survey moves from Draft to Live to Closed. You can archive a survey that isn't live. When a survey closes, Span submits any answers people saved but didn't submit.

Setup

You need the Manage Surveys permission. Owners, Admins, and the Survey Admins role have it by default. The wizard has five steps.

Step 1: Settings. Name the survey and choose Transparent or Anonymous.

Step 2: Questions. Turn template themes and questions on or off and add your own. On the same step, set theme voting: off, pick 1 to 3, or pick 3 areas to improve. Pulse surveys can't use voting.

Step 3: Participants. Choose people:

• By Criteria: filter by team, job level, job title, job family, whether someone is a manager, AI tool usage, or person tags. For example, invite only levels L3 to L5.

• Manually: pick by manager, by team, or by type (Individual Contributors, Managers (Contributing), Managers (Non-Contributing)).

• Participants limit: invite a random sample of a set size.

• Days since last survey: skip people surveyed recently (30 days by default).

• Exclude the following people: leave out specific people. You can also remove contractors from the list.

Participants must be active people in your Span roster. They don't need a Span login for email or Slack invitations, because each invitation carries a personal link. Share-link surveys are different: every respondent must sign in to Span, and Span flags participants without Span login access. Pulse surveys flag participants without a linked Slack account.

Step 4: Communications.

• Pick a channel: Email, Slack, Email + Slack, or Share link. Share-link surveys send no automated messages; you post the link yourself.

• For Slack, send from the Span app or as yourself (connect your own Slack account first).

• Edit the Launch, First Reminder, and Last Reminder messages and set the Close date. Reminders go only to people who haven't completed the survey.

• Messages accept placeholders: [Company Name], [Employee First Name], [Employee Last Name], [Survey Name], [Survey Link], [Survey Button], and [Close Date].

Step 5: Confirm. Review and launch now, or save as a draft. While a survey is live, you can add missing participants and send a reminder by hand.

Reading results

• Summary: responses, participation rate, positive sentiment, top 3 and bottom 3 themes, top voted areas, and the AI insights card. Use Compare to for the Span Benchmark (Q4 2024), the entire organization when filters are on, or an earlier closed survey.

• Themes and questions: answer distributions and comments for each question.

• Heatmap: themes by Teams, Managers, or Job Levels. Transparent surveys can also group by Tenure and Custom Field.

• Participants: who is pending, in progress, or submitted.

• AI insights: an executive summary, top and bottom themes, top voted areas, and comment themes. It appears once the survey closes.

• Export: Download responses (CSV).

Results update as people respond. You don't need to wait for the survey to close, except for AI insights.

Things to know

• Positive sentiment is the share of rating answers that are 4 or 5.

• Participation vs. completion. Participation rate counts people who saved at least one answer; completion rate counts people who submitted. Opening the survey without saving an answer doesn't count. After close, saved answers are submitted, so the two match.

• Slicing raises the anonymity bar. In Anonymous surveys, filtering or grouping by up to 2 attributes needs 4 respondents, 3 attributes need 16, and 4 need 64. Anonymous results can be sliced only by team, manager, level, job title, job family, and location. Smaller teams are pooled or hidden in the CSV export.

• Anonymous answers don't connect to metrics. The Survey Sentiment filter on metric reports, and Analyze with Src on closed surveys, use Transparent responses only.

• Survey access is all or nothing. Anyone with Manage Surveys sees every survey. Managers can't be limited to their own team's results.

• Pulse limits. Pulse surveys go out by Slack only, allow up to 5 questions, and have no scheduled reminders or voting.

• Survey metrics aren't available in custom dashboards.

• The Span Benchmark is a fixed Q4 2024 dataset.

Worked example

An Anonymous DevEx survey goes to 40 engineers, and 28 respond. One team of 6 has 3 responses, so its results stay hidden until a fourth person responds. A Code Review question gets 28 ratings, of which 17 are 4 or 5, so its positive sentiment is 17 / 28 = 61%. Grouping the heatmap by team alone needs 4 respondents per cell; adding job level and location as filters (3 attributes) raises the bar to 16.

Best practices

• Keep it focused: 10 to 20 questions across 4 to 6 themes avoids fatigue.

• Turn on voting so you know what to fix first.

• Give people 1 to 2 weeks, with a mid-survey and a final reminder.

• Send from a trusted leader on Slack for better response.

• Close surveys formally and share what you'll act on.

• Run DevEx surveys quarterly and use Pulse for quick checks between them.

Related articles

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Benchmarking in Span

Roles & Permissions in Span

Need help?

Contact your Span account team or reach out to support@span.app.