Measuring Developer Productivity and the New Future of Work

Developer productivity is about more than an individual’s activity levels or the efficiency of the engineering systems, and it cannot be measured by a single metric or dimension. In this talk I will discuss how to use the SPACE framework to measuring developer productivity across multiple dimensions to better understand productivity in practice. I will also discuss common myths around developer productivity, and propose a collection of sample metrics to navigate around those pitfalls. Measuring developer productivity at Microsoft has allowed us to build new insights about what challenges the shift to remote work has introduced for software engineers, and how to overcome many of those challenges moving forward into a new future of work.