DevEx & Metrics
Measuring Developer Experience, DORA, and SPACE.
Developer Experience (DevEx)
Platform Engineering fails if it doesn't improve the life of the developer. But how do you measure "better"?
DORA Metrics
The "Godfather" metrics from the Accelerate book (Google DevOps Research). They measure Velocity and Stability.
- Deployment Frequency: How often do we ship? (Elite: On-demand).
- Lead Time for Changes: Time from "Commit" to "Running in Prod".
- Change Failure Rate: Percentage of deploys that cause an outage/rollback.
- Time to Restore Service (MTTR): How fast do we recover from failure?
The SPACE Framework
DORA measures the pipeline, but not the human. SPACE (GitHub/Microsoft Research) measures the holistic experience.
- S - Satisfaction: How happy are devs? (NPS surveys).
- P - Performance: Outcome of the work.
- A - Activity: Count of actions (PRs opened, tickets closed). Warning: Don't use this for performance reviews.
- C - Communication: Collaboration and docs searchability.
- E - Efficiency/Flow: Can I work without interruption? (Meeting load, Context switching).
Cognitive Load
The silent killer.
- Intrinsic Load: "How do I write this Java Class?" (Good).
- Extraneous Load: "How do I configure the AWS VPC Peering for the Staging environment?" (Bad).
The Goal of Platform Eng: Minimize Extraneous Load so devs can focus on Intrinsic Load (Business Logic).
Survey your Users
Instrumentation only tells half the story. Run a quarterly survey:
- "I can easily find the documentation I need."
- "I spend too much time maintaining infrastructure."
- "Our tools help me move fast."