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DRIVE vs SPACE: What each framework measures and when to use them

Aug 11, 2026 By Ganesh Datta In Cortex
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.
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cortex

A practical guide to risk-based code review

Aug 6, 2026 By Cristina Buenahora In Cortex
Traditional code review no longer keeps pace with how much code teams are shipping. Risk-based code review is the response: instead of giving every pull request the same scrutiny, you route human attention by risk, letting low-risk changes ship with light or automated review and reserving deep human review for the changes that are expensive to get wrong.
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The 2026 pocket guide to engineering metrics

Jul 31, 2026 By Cortex In Cortex
Most engineering leaders are drowning in data but starved for insight. We have dashboards full of metrics, but they often create more questions than answers and rarely tell us what to do next. In the age of AI, where development velocity is accelerating at an unprecedented rate, this problem is only getting worse. Shipping code faster than you can fix it is an existential risk, and a dashboard that doesn't lead to action is just a distraction.
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DRIVE Deep Dive: Efficiency

Jul 28, 2026 By Ganesh Datta In Cortex
This is the fifth and final post in the DRIVE Deep Dive series, following Delivery, Reliability, Initiatives, and Vigilance. For the complete model across all five pillars, download the full DRIVE framework. -- Engineering money and time land in three places a leadership review can actually act on: the cloud bill, the internal spend on AI and LLM tokens, and the split between building new things and keeping old ones running.
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Engineer Gleb Lesnikov on Why Splitting a Monolith into Microservices May Sink Your Business

Engineer Gleb Lesnikov on Why Splitting a Monolith into Microservices May Sink Your Business

Jul 22, 2026 By OpsMatters In OpsMatters
Gleb Lesnikov has been developing the system behind Dodo Pizza, an international fast-food chain, since joining the company in 2015. Over the years, the local business turned into a company running over 1,600 restaurants. When Dodo expanded rapidly, Gleb had to take key technical decisions that allowed the company to scale and succeed. Looking back, he reflects on the period when the company moved to a microservices architecture and explains how he managed to solve problems that could have caused the company to collapse.
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DRIVE Deep Dive: Vigilance

Jul 21, 2026 By Ganesh Datta In Cortex
This is the fourth post in our DRIVE Deep Dive series. Over the coming weeks we're examining each pillar of the DRIVE framework in turn. For the complete model, download the full DRIVE framework. Our last post covered Initiatives. Up next: Efficiency. The bottleneck on writing code is gone, and the industry is responding the way it always does when a constraint disappears: by producing more.
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How to Trace Microservices WITHOUT OpenTelemetry

Jul 9, 2026 By Speedscale In Speedscale
Learn how to trace complex multi-hop transactions across microservices when OpenTelemetry isn't available or trace parents get lost. This quick tutorial demonstrates how to use full-text search in proxymock (a free CLI and UI tool) to isolate user journeys (like looking up a specific username) and instantly generate waterfall tracing views. Whether you are working locally or in a Kubernetes cluster, you can record API traffic, visualize multi-hop requests, and easily transition those captures into load or regression tests.
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cortex

DORA measures delivery. DRIVE measures the organization behind it.

Jul 8, 2026 By Cortex In Cortex
You can hit every DORA target and still be losing ground. Deploy frequency up, lead time down, change failure rate and MTTR both healthy, but underneath it could be hiding an organization slowly getting worse at turning work into reliable software. New services shipping without clear owners, an attack surface widening faster than anyone is tracking, on-call rotations quietly filling up, a migration that was supposed to close last quarter still limping along.
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DRIVE Deep Dive: Reliability

Jul 7, 2026 By Ganesh Datta In Cortex
This is the second post in our DRIVE Deep Dive series. Over the coming weeks we're examining each pillar of the DRIVE framework in turn, and mapping DRIVE against the frameworks engineering leaders already run on, including DORA and SPACE. For the complete model, download the full DRIVE framework. Our last post covered Delivery. Up next: Initiatives. --- AI has removed the last real constraint on producing code, and organizations are shipping more of it than ever.
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