How were the Axify graphics and approach chosen? Various concepts and frameworks on teams' performance measurement form the platform's basis, and the SPACE framework is part of it.
What is the SPACE framework?
In 2021, researchers from GitHub, the University of Victoria, and Microsoft published the results of their research on developer productivity. In addition, they proposed a new approach to defining, measuring, and predicting productivity. The lead author of the paper is Dr. Nicole Forsgren, who was Vice President of Research and Strategy at GitHub at the time.
Out of this research came SPACE, a framework highlighting different dimensions of developer productivity aimed at dispelling persistent myths about it, such as the idea that productivity is related to the volume of activity, tools, or individual performance.
The framework provides a way to think rationally about productivity in a much bigger space and choose metrics carefully to reveal what those metrics mean and what their limitations are if used alone or in the wrong context.
Source and reference: Article by InfoQ, published on March 18, 2021
SPACE is the acronym for five dimensions to consider when we want to understand and measure the productivity of a development team.
- Satisfaction and well-being, both of the developers and of the engineering systems.
- Performance refers to the result of a process such as code review velocity.
- Activité, i.e. the number of output actions such as deployment frequency or the number of completed code reviews.
- Collaboration and communication, aka how people interact and work together, including knowledge sharing.
- And efficiency, which refers to the execution of work with minimal delays or interruptions.
Each of these dimensions is essential to understanding and measuring the productivity of development teams on three levels.
- The individual
- The team or group
- The system
Note that SPACE does not necessarily recommend using all of these measures at once but rather selecting specific criteria (at least three would be a minimum) that span the three levels and capture different dimensions of productivity.
How is it related to Axify?
A tool such as Axify that draws your attention to various indicators allows you to target points to address as a team and thus optimize your engineering processes. In addition, these inspections and analyses will lead you to boost your operations, increasing your delivery capacity and the quality of the work delivered.
Please note that Axify aims to improve the performance of development teams. Therefore, we do not consider the performance of the individual. Only the team and system levels are considered.
The following table groups the dimensions of the SPACE framework and some matching Axify metrics.
| SPACE dimension | Axify |
| Satisfaction and well-being |
Human Axis
|
| Performance |
Process Axis
Technical Axis
|
| Activity |
Technical Axis
Daily Digest
|
| Collaboration and communication |
Technical Axis
Daily Digest
|
| Efficiency |
Process Axis
Technical Axis
|
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