SPACE framework for developer productivity (forsgren)

SPACE framework

psycological safety eBay Velocity Initiative Forsgren also co-wrote Accelerate.

Dimensions of developer productivity:

1. Satisfaction & well-being
   • satisfaction is a leading indicator for productivity
   • measures:
     • degree of satisfaction w/ your job
     • would you recommend your team to others?
     • do you have the tools and resources to get your work done?
     • “burnout”
2. performance: outcomes, not output (b/c output isn’t correlated to success)
   • measures:
     • quality: reliability, absense of bugs, service health
     • impact: customer satisfaction, feature usage, customer adoption/retention, cost reduction
3. activity:
   • measures
     • design/coding: count of PRs/commits/reviews/design docs
     • CI/CD: count of builds, deploys & infrastructure utilization
     • ops activity: count of incidents/issues and distribution of severity, oncall participation, incident mitigation
4. communication & collaboration: collaboration even at the expense of personal productivity
   • proxies for measurement:
     • discoverability of documentation
     • frequency of integration (CI)
     • quality of reviews contributed by team members
     • network metrics to see who is connected to who
     • onboarding time & experience for new devs
5. efficiency and flow: accomplish work w/ minimal interruptions or delays
   • measures:
     • number of handoffs in a process (especially across different teams)
     • perceived ability to stay in flow & complete work
     • interruptions: quantity, timing, how they’re spaced, impact on dev work & flow
     • time through the system: total, value-added time, wait time.

code reviews is important but can cause challenges if it interrupts workflows or if delays cause constraints in the system

They recommend capturing AT LEAST 3 metrics and they should capture different dimensions. We should additionally be layering in perceptive measures like “how productive did you feel today?” to better understand their lived experiences.

Having too many metrics may lead to confusion & lower motivation.

Myths:

1. it’s not all about activity (commits, prs, etc)
2. it’s not all about individual performance (though it is a balance)
3. productivity is a multi-dimensional problem
4. productivity measures are only for managers
5. it’s only a tooling problem