The SPACE Framework: Measuring Software Development Productivity

Assessing your engineering teams' productivity is never easy when you're a tech leader trying to boost performance and efficiency. It all starts with understanding what makes developers more productive and efficient in a fast-paced software development environment. Researchers from Microsoft, Github, and the University of Victoria wanted to address this issue, and this is how they came up with SPACE. This framework tries to encompass engineering productivity holistically.

SPACE is an acronym for five main elements defining what it takes for software engineers to be productive and provide the best innovative solutions: Satisfaction and well-being, Performance, Activity, Collaboration and communication, Efficiency and flow. Here is Waydev's approach to measuring these five elements that provide precious insight and predictability into outcomes and productivity results:
1. Satisfaction and well-being:
- General satisfaction: take surveys and communicate with your engineers to find out if they're happy with their workload, processes, and workflows.
- Retention: improving procedures, communication, and nurturing a healthy work culture will help your company retain employees.
- Motivation and burnout: it's essential to keep your employees motivated but not burden them with workloads that are too heavy.
2. Performance
- Output: Waydev uses throughput reports to see your teams' progress throughout the development process.
- DORA Metrics: one of the most reliable ways to assess engineering teams' performance through specialized velocity, stability, and reliability metrics.
- Reliability (uptime): when downtime is reduced, this indicates your teams' ability to put out reliable software.
- User satisfaction: end-user satisfaction is a key measurement of the quality of your teams' results.
3. Activity
- Pull requests and commits: Waydev's comprehensive PR reports show you everything about the speed and efficiency of your teams' reviews and PR merges.
- The commit timeline (velocity in resolving the PR): tracking how fast PR reviews are opened and resolved is another good way of assessing developers' activity.
- Heatmap report: this can help you understand when your employees are most focused and productive and resolve tasks faster.
- Deployment Frequency: shows you the frequency of quality code release to production.
4. Collaboration and communication
- Review Collaboration: our Review collaboration reports offer data about how teams work together to complete tasks.
- The time it takes for work to be integrated: is about how teams work together to advance tasks from one stage to the next.
- Onboarding time: how long it takes until a new team member becomes productive (is integrated into the team and can solve tasks with no/ minimal help).
5. Efficiency and flow
- DORA Metrics: can be used to evaluate engineering teams' workflows.
- Ability to get into a flow: the teams' capacity to get into a flow of work and stay there for a given amount of time.
- Total number of interruptions: how these affect your team members' focus and overall flow.

The SPACE framework doesn't just give you a series of standard metrics, but it changes mentalities, and it opens new doors in understanding how to improve productivity at an organizational level.

[szeredaiakos]

I like SPACE. It is a one stop shop to create confusion. More confusion on the metrics side means we, as an engineering team, can easily game the system.