It's time to look at software engineering performance metrics!

Measuring the efficiency and performance of engineering teams is a challenge that engineering leaders have long worked to resolve. That is how we’ve ended up with four different frameworks for doing so. More interestingly, they largely are each built on top of one another:

DORA, SPACE, DevEx, and as of December 2024… DX Core 4.

In this first post, we cover the originals: DORA and SPACE...

1. DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment)

📜 Origin: Popularized by the seminal book Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, this framework is rooted in years of rigorous research into DevOps and engineering performance.

💪 Strengths:

• Standardization: Focuses on four key metrics—Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes*, Change Failure Rate, and Mean Time to Recovery—that provide a clear gauge of software delivery capabilities.

• Benchmarking: Enables teams to compare performance against industry standards.

Ideal for: Teams focused on improving software delivery performance and reliability.

*DORA uses the term Lead Time for Changes, but their metric specifically measures time from first commit to deployment to production. This approach aligns with the traditional definition of cycle time, not lead time.

2. SPACE Framework

📜 Origin: Introduced in 2021, the SPACE framework provides a holistic view of developer productivity, emphasizing multiple dimensions beyond just output.

💪 Strengths:

• Comprehensive View: Encompasses five dimensions—Satisfaction and Well-being, Performance, Activity, Communication and Collaboration, and Efficiency and Flow—to capture the overall productivity and well-being of engineering teams.

• Customizable: Allows teams to tailor metrics to their specific context and needs.

Ideal for: Organizations seeking to balance productivity with developer satisfaction, collaboration, and well-being. It’s especially useful when addressing challenges like burnout, inefficiency, or low team morale.

3. DevEx (Developer Experience) Framework

📜 Origin: Crafted by Abi Noda and the experts including the creators of DORA and SPACE, the DevEx framework focuses on the day-to-day experiences of developers that impact their productivity.

💪 Strengths:

• Developer-Centric: Highlights the importance of developers’ flow state, feedback loops and cognitive load within both their lived experiences and measured in their workflows. Relies partially on surveys of developers’ sentiment and data from tools and systems.

• Actionable Insights: Provides practical guidance for improving the developer experience, leading to enhanced productivity.

Ideal for: Teams seeking to identify and remove friction points in the development process to foster a more supportive work environment.

4. DX Core 4 Framework

📜 Origin: Introduced in December 2024, the DX Core 4 framework aims to unify existing productivity frameworks, combining elements from DORA, SPACE, and DevEx. It comes from DX’ Abi Noda and Laura Tacho and in collaboration with the authors of from the aforementioned frameworks.

💪 Strengths:

• Unified Approach: Provides a single, practical, and balanced framework that supports decision-making at every level of the organization.

• Four Dimensions: Focuses on Speed (PR throughput), Effectiveness (Developer Experience Index), Quality (CFR), and Impact (% of time spent on new features), each with key and secondary metrics to offer a comprehensive view of productivity.

Ideal for: Organizations looking for a cohesive framework that aligns engineering metrics with business outcomes.

✅ Choosing the Right Framework

Selecting the appropriate framework depends on your team’s specific goals and challenges:

• For improving software delivery performance: DORA provides standardized metrics to benchmark and enhance delivery capabilities.

• For a holistic view of productivity: SPACE offers a comprehensive perspective, considering multiple dimensions of team performance.

• For focusing on developer experience: DevEx emphasizes the daily experiences and tools that impact developer efficiency.

• For a unified approach that aligns delivery, experience, and business objectives: DX Core 4 integrates elements from all three frameworks, offering a balanced and cohesive model.

With all of these, it is important to get a baseline of where the team is and layer objectives on top of that baseline.

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