Applying the Core 4 framework (Part 1)

How to collect and calculate the Core 4 metrics.

Welcome to the latest issue of Engineering Enablement, a weekly newsletter sharing research and perspectives on developer productivity.

Upcoming event: Laura and I are hosting a virtual discussion on how to use developer productivity metrics. Learn more and register here.

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Last month we announced the DX Core 4, a prescriptive framework for measuring and improving developer productivity. A question that’s come up since announcing the Core 4 is whether we have any resources on how to calculate the Core 4 metrics and start using them.

Today, Laura is sharing a survey template that you can send to your teams to start capturing the Core 4 metrics. In part 2 next week, we’ll explain how to use the metrics to link developer productivity projects to business outcomes.

Here’s Laura to walk you through this template and help you understand how to use it.

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“Start with a survey.”

Whenever an engineering leader approaches me with a question of how to start measuring developer experience and productivity, I’ve given this same answer for the last several years. And when we designed the Core 4 framework, we took ease of collection into account for each of the metrics we picked. It’s possible to use survey data to measure each of the key metrics in Core 4, and today I’m sharing a survey template so you can do it yourself.

Creating your survey

You can use this template with any surveying tool—Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, Typeform, etc.—just make sure you can view the responses in a spreadsheet in order to calculate averages. Important: responses must be anonymous to preserve trust, and this survey is designed for people who write code as part of their job.

If you already have access to clean data from your workflow tools, you can use that data along with survey data, but it’s not a requirement.

Depending on your company size, you may want to collect certain demographic information, such as team identity and tenure, in order to analyze the results. There are some considerations to take into account, which I elaborate on in this article.

Calculating your metrics

Once you’ve collected survey responses, it’s time to calculate your results.

• For Speed, Quality, and Impact, find the average value for each question’s responses.

• For Effectiveness, calculate the percent of favorable responses (also called a Top 2 Box score) across all Effectiveness responses. See the example in the template.

With your own results, you can compare your performance with those of industry peers by looking at Core 4 benchmarking data.

In our next issue, I’ll walk you through how to apply the Core 4 framework to drive improvement within your org.

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Who’s hiring right now

This week’s featured job openings. See more open roles here.

• GitHub is hiring a Director of Software Engineering - DevEx | US

• Lyft is hiring an Engineering Manager - DevEx | Toronto

• The Hartford is hiring a Sr Staff Platform Engineer | Multiple cities, US

• Pinterest is hiring a Senior PM - Infrastructure | San Francisco, CA

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-Abi