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Delivery26 October 20265 min read

Developer experience and the SPACE framework, practically

Developer experience (DevEx) is how it feels to do development work in your organisation: how quickly feedback arrives, how clear the work is and how much gets in the way. The SPACE framework offers a way to measure productivity without reducing it to one number.

In this post
  1. The five dimensions of SPACE
  2. The key idea
  3. Practical steps
  4. What to avoid
  5. Sources and further reading

The five dimensions of SPACE

  • Satisfaction and well-being.
  • Performance: outcomes of the work.
  • Activity: counts of actions, such as commits or reviews.
  • Communication and collaboration.
  • Efficiency and flow: time without interruption or waiting.

The key idea

No single measure captures productivity. Use several across more than one dimension, and include what people say as well as what systems record.

Practical steps

  1. Ask developers what slows them down most.
  2. Measure waiting: builds, reviews, environment provisioning.
  3. Fix the biggest friction first.
  4. Re-measure and share the result.

What to avoid

Using activity counts, such as lines of code or commits, to judge individuals. They are easy to count and misleading to read.

Sources and further reading

  1. Forsgren et al. “The SPACE of Developer Productivity.” ACM Queue, 2021.

IICTP is a new independent credential and is not ISO/IEC 17024 accredited.

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