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Last week we hosted our annual conference, EVOLVE, where global engineering leaders came to talk through the realities of building AI-native SDLCs. When asked to name the biggest friction point in their software lifecycle, attendees gave telling answers: ‘reviewing changes’ took 36 percent, ‘measuring impact’ took 35, and ‘building’ drew zero votes.

Engineering organizations spent the past decade learning to measure developer and team productivity. Measurement of the organization itself did not keep pace. Now that agents are responsible for writing most of the code across many engineering organizations, it’s more important than ever to have an effective methodology for measuring productivity.

When Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey, and their coauthors published "The SPACE of Developer Productivity" in 2021, they settled an argument the industry had been losing for years. Productivity is not one number, and it is not a proxy like commits or story points. It is multidimensional, and any attempt to flatten it into a single metric will mislead you. Most of what came after in developer productivity measurement builds on SPACE. SPACE and DRIVE were built for different jobs.