SPACE
SPACE is a framework for understanding and measuring developer productivity.
Components
Satisfaction and well-being
- Fulfillment with work, team, tools, and culture.
- Well-being covers health and happiness, and work impact on it.
- Measure:
- Employee satisfaction
- Developer efficacy
- Burnout
Performance
- Hard to measure:
- Code quantity isn't a representation of quality.
- Code quality doesn't indicate customer value.
- Customer value doesn't always equate to business value.
- Measure:
- Quality: reliability, bug count, service health.
- Impact: customer satisfaction, adoption and retention, feature usage, cost reduction.
Activity
- Count of actions or outputs involved in performing work.
- Valuable, but limited.
- Measure:
- Design/code: volume/count of design documents and specifications, tickets, PRs, commits, reviews.
- CI/CD: count of build/test, deploy/release, infrastructure utilisation.
- Operational activity: volume/count of incidents/defects by severity, participation in on-call rota, incident mitigation.
Communication and collaboration
- How do people and teams communicate?
- Value transparency and awareness.
- Diverse and inclusive teams are higher performing.
- Measure:
- Discoverability of knowledge (expertise in addition to documentation).
- Integration pace.
- Quality of review.
- Network metrics (connectivity between team members).
- Onboarding time and qualitative experience.
Efficiency and flow
- Team efficiency measured through VSM and can be optimised to metrics such as DORA metrics's deployment frequency.
- Individual productivity is based on ability to enter and maintain a flow state, which runs counter to collaboration tasks (such as review).
- Measure:
- Number of process handoffs, between teams or people.
- Perceived ability to complete work in flow.
- Interruption quantity, time, spacing; and impact on development flow and work.
- Time measures through systems: total, value-added, wait.