Think you can’t measure developer productivity? Think again

With SPACE, technology leaders can finally solve the productivity puzzle, says Hywel Carver,(pictured) co-founder and CEO of Skiller Whale

Technology leaders across all sectors are tasked with bringing the right tech capabilities to the table at the right time. But they’re facing a myriad of challenges in 2023. A turbulent economy that’s leading to slashed budgets, a developer workforce that’s burned out after years of unprecedented innovation during the pandemic, and executive teams that always seem to expect more productivity. Many will be asking themselves the same question: how to improve productivity when they can’t afford to hire more people?

Assessing the starting point of a team is a critical first step in answering that question. But productivity has never been an easy thing to measure when it comes to software engineering. It’s complex, often intangible work that can’t be accurately captured using purely numerical metrics like lines of code produced, the number of bugs fixed, or how long a review takes. That hasn’t stopped some companies from trying. One well-known tech giant, for example, offered a $1,000 bonus for each bug fixed in the two weeks before they shipped the new version of their flagship product. The perverse incentive encouraged people to leave bugs in new code they wrote, rather than fixing them immediately. They could then report the bug, fix it later and claim their reward.

But a new framework from Nicole Forsgren and Microsoft Research offers a more holistic approach to productivity. SPACE is organised around five pillars: satisfaction and wellbeing, performance, activity, communication and collaboration, and efficiency and flow. Forsgren has said the Covid-19 pandemic and shift to hybrid work expedited the need for the industry to better understand developer productivity and wellbeing, and that “doing so in an efficient and fair way is critical”. 

Making SPACE for a new approach 

There’s a lot of flexibility written into the framework and how it’s applied by tech leaders will depend on the context of each organisation. But leaders might start by exploring satisfaction – how fulfilled do developers feel about their work, team, tools, and the culture within which they work? How healthy and happy are they, and how much stress do they feel under? 

Performance relates to outcome rather than output – so rather than count the number of releases, a CTO or other tech leader might ask whether a release was made on time and if the goals of the release were met. Activity metrics will depend on the design of an organisation’s engineering system along the development life cycle, but leaders should look to use measures around quality (such as reliability and absence of bugs), alongside impact (e.g. customer satisfaction and cost reduction). 

 Communication and collaboration considers how people and teams work together, and how able individuals feel to bring their whole selves to work. Metrics such as the discoverability of documentation and expertise, the quality of reviews, and the time spent onboarding new members of the team are all helpful. And finally, efficiency and flow questions how able a team feels to get complex tasks done with minimal distractions or interruptions. GitHub has found that developers who average just one meeting per day have a 99% chance of doing high quality work. That drops to 14% for three meetings per day. 

Upgrading performance with targeted learning

SPACE will give tech leaders a system to measure developer productivity, but it will also highlight what needs to change for productivity to improve. That may be environmental or cultural factors, new tools and processes, or investing in targeted, high-quality learning to boost the skill level within a team. That not only helps with making developers feel more satisfied and empowered to make a difference, but it will also create more skilled teams, able to produce better software faster, impacting overall business performance.  

Measuring and optimising the productivity of engineering teams isn’t an exact science. There isn’t one metric that will summarise every facet, or a magic wand that will improve everything overnight. It’s an iterative process that will take time, pose challenging questions, and require investment in the right places. But organisations that are going to perform need people who are good at their jobs. And – at least in the short term – tech leaders are going to need to focus on the people they already have to meet those ambitions. 

Hywel Carver is the co-founder and CEO of Skiller Whale, a live coaching platform for engineering teams that targets individual skill gaps to achieve a team-level strategic outcome. Find out more about SPACE and live coaching with Skiller Whale’s latest whitepaper.