Developer productivity with Nicole Forsgren (the creator of DORA)

In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I am joined by one of the foremost experts in developer productivity: Dr. Nicole Forsgren. Nicole is the creator of the widely adopted DORA and SPACE frameworks, co-author of the award-winning book Accelerate and the DevOps Handbook (2nd edition), and author of the State of DevOps reports. She is currently a Partner at Microsoft Research, leading developer productivity research and strategy, and is currently working on a book about developer experience with Abi Noda.

In this conversation, we discuss Nicole’s frameworks for productivity, the evolution of engineering metrics, and the role of developer experience.

We discuss the following:

• Why PRs and Diffs are incomplete as a solo metric and how to view them in context
• The importance of a holistic set of metrics for evaluating productivity
• An overview of DORA’s four key metrics, its strengths, and its limitations
• The evolution of processes and tools since DORA, including SPACE
• What developer experience is—and concrete ways to improve it
• Common characteristics of highly productive engineering teams
• How faster onboarding might challenge Brook’s Law
• How AI tooling is impacting developer productivity and best practices for experimentation
• And much more!

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Brought to by:
• DX — An engineering intelligence platform designed by leading researchers getdx.com/?utm_source=pragmaticengineer
• Sentry — Error and performance monitoring for developers sentry.io/pragmatic/

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• Measuring Developer Productivity: Real-World Examples newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-devel…
• A new way to measure developer productivity – from the creators of DORA and SPACE newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/developer-produ…
• Measuring Engineering Efficiency at LinkedIn newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/linkedin-engine…
• How Uber is Measuring Engineering Productivity newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/uber-eng-produc…
• Measuring software engineering productivity newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineering-pro…

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Where to find Dr. Nicole Forsgren:
• X: x.com/nicolefv
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/nicolefv/
• Website: nicolefv.com/

Where to find Gergely Orosz:
• X: x.com/GergelyOrosz
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/gergelyorosz/
• Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/gergely.pragmaticengineer.com
• Newsletter and blog: www.pragmaticengineer.com/

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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Intro
(02:03) PRs and Diffs and how to view them in the right context
(07:42) EngThrive at Microsoft
(10:26) The importance of having a holistic set of metrics in evaluating productivity
(17:00) The four key metrics of DORA
(23:57) The evolution of processes and tools since DORA, including SPACE
(26:40) An explanation of developer experience — and ways to improve it
(30:44) Devex at startups vs. larger companies
(34:20) Why measuring developer productivity is so difficult
(39:05) How to make a case for platform teams
(44:34) Common characteristics of highly productive teams
(51:01) Brook’s law and how faster onboarding might make it irrelevant
(52:49) Onboarding for internal transfers
(54:18) Shifting culture towards technology first
(58:36) How middle management can improve engineering culture
(1:03:36) How AI tooling is impacting developer productivity
(1:06:42) Potential use cases for AI
(1:08:40) A case for experimenting with AI coding tools and how to maintain flow state
(1:15:30) Rapid fire round

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See the transcript and other references from the episode at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast

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