What should leaders measure and focus on to improve developer productivity?
Our recent paper desribes how conventional approaches fall short, and how to instead focus on and measure developer experience rather than specious measures of output.
Today, I'm excited to share a first look at our DX25 core model, which is our own instantiation of the concepts outlined in our paper.
Our model includes three core components:
- Drivers. These are the 25 top drivers of developer experience. Specifically, these are DevEx factors with the highest industry-wide correlation with KPIs based on our research.
- KPIs. Our model includes three validated KPIs for developer experience which correlate with business outcomes. The KPIs anchor to speed, ease, and quality – the same dimensions used by Google.
- Outcomes. Our ongoing research investigates the impact of developer productivity on business outcomes such as commercial performance, employee engagement, and attrition.
This model is derived from ongoing research by our cross-disciplinary team that includes Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Dr. Michaela Greiler, and Dr. Liz Pavese.
The DX25 model has been successfully adopted and used by hundreds of companies including Dropbox, Twilio, and Brex.
We hope that sharing our open model can help engineering leaders and business leaders align on approach as well as recognize the importance of making continued investments in improving developer productivity.