DX Announces DX Core 4: A New Standard for Measuring Engineering Productivity

SALT LAKE CITY, Dec. 10, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- DX, the engineering intelligence platform designed by researchers, today unveiled the DX Core 4, a new framework that addresses the long-standing challenge of measuring engineering productivity.

The DX Core 4 unifies DORA, SPACE, and DevEx—three widely adopted measurement frameworks—into a single approach. Development was led by DX with input from DX advisors and researchers including Dr. Nicole Forsgren, the creator of DORA, and Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey, co-author of SPACE.

"Measuring developer productivity has been a notoriously tricky problem," shares Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox. "The DX Core 4 marries the state of the art in terms of research with a solution you can deploy in your company, and gives you a much more cohesive picture of what's happening in your organization."

The DX Core 4

The DX Core 4 defines engineering productivity through four key dimensions: speed, effectiveness, quality, and impact. Each dimension is measured using a primary metric and several supporting metrics, designed to counterbalance one another to avoid optimizing one dimension at the expense of another (e.g., prioritizing speed while quality suffers).

The DX Core 4 dimensions:

• Speed: Capture the flow of work with metrics like Diffs per Engineer and Perceived Rate of Delivery, ensuring teams can deliver quickly without bottlenecks.
• Effectiveness: The Developer Experience Index (DXI), a standardized set of 14 survey items that quantify friction, measures effectiveness through an overall single score.
• Quality: Captured using metrics like Change Failure Rate to assess stability and reliability in production.
• Impact: Evaluated by metrics such as the percentage of time spent on new capabilities, reflecting the ratio of budget allocated toward innovation and value delivery.

The DX Core 4 was developed and refined with over 300 organizations, helping organizations achieve outcomes such as 3-12% increases in engineering efficiency and 14% increases in R&D time spent on feature development.

The DX Core 4 offers a clear, prescriptive approach to measuring productivity, with metrics that are balanced, easy to implement, and relevant to stakeholders at every level of the organization. 

For more details on the DX Core 4 and to access industry benchmarks, go here.

About DX
DX is the engineering intelligence platform designed by leading researchers. The platform equips engineering leaders and platform teams with the data they need to lead with confidence and deliver higher ROI per engineer.

SOURCE DX