Monday Links 5
The SPACE of Developer Productivity by Dr Nicole Forsgren, Dr Margaret Anne-Storey, and researchers from Microsoft.
This article explicates several common myths and misconceptions about developer productivity. The most important takeaway from exposing these myths is that productivity cannot be reduced to a single dimension (or metric!). The prevalence of these myths and the need to bust them motivated our work to develop a practical multidimensional framework, because only by examining a constellation of metrics in tension can we understand and influence developer productivity. This framework, called SPACE, captures the most important dimensions of developer productivity: satisfaction and well-being; performance; activity; communication and collaboration; and efficiency and flow. By recognizing and measuring productivity with more than just a single dimension, teams and organizations can better understand how people and teams work, and they can make better decisions.
Will Larson on Service Cookbooks
Most approaches to instrumenting time allocation require a large time investment from your team to track tasks, which somewhat defeats the plan goal to save their time. One approach I found to work very well, without requiring major workflow changes by your team, is creating a simple internal website that contains your team’s service cookbook.