The SPACE of Developer Productivity - Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey, Chandra Maddila, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck, and Jenna Butler, ACM Queue

This resource first appeared in issue #66 on 20 Mar 2021 and has tags Managing Your Career: Productivity, Technical Leadership: Software Development, Managing A Team: Other

The SPACE of Developer Productivity - Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey, Chandra Maddila, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck, and Jenna Butler, ACM Queue

We’ve covered several times the challenges of measuring developer productivity, particularly individual developer productivity. Forsgren et al walk us through recent literature on the subject, disabusing us of some common myths and encouraging us to instead, as managers of developers, keep an eye on the SPACE dimensions of how well our team is doing:

• Satisfaction and well-being - employee satisfaction, developers having the tools they need, avoiding burnout
• Performance - outcomes like quality and impact
• Activity - the things done; design and coding, CI/CD, operational work like incidents
• Communication and Collaboration - how discoverable is knowledge, how quickly is work integrated, what is onboarding time like
• Efficiency and flow - The number of handoffs in a process, perceived ability to stay in flow and complete work, wait times, interruptions

What metrics for that might look like are as shown by the table below.