The framework is explicitly titled "Measuring developer productivity with the DX Core 4". Diffs/engineer, even if not at the individual level, is still meant as a proxy for individual throughput. The question they are trying to answer is "how do we make Ganesh X% more productive?"
My argument is that that is the wrong question to be trying to optimize for, regardless of how you measure it. It also does not capture the risk dimensions with AI adoption (and the reduction in humans-in-the-loop) which my paper tries to directly address.
I'm the author – I spent 6 months writing this myself, and, if it helps, our product doesn't even do the stuff in the framework. I'm not sure what I'd be selling?
I know I'm biased but Core 4 (and similar) rub me the wrong way – measuring individual developers as the atomic unit IMO is always meaningless. It's a proxy for organizational health but not directly correlated.
Especially now with AI, what do metrics like "prs/engineer" even mean when you have background agents open/reviewing/releasing PRs without human intervention? what is the right unit for measuring health of the org?
FWIW I write a lot more about "why not existing frameworks" in depth in the full paper.
Initiatives are defined specifically as non-productive, technical leverage-producing initiatives that affect the org's health as a whole and are often left behind. For example, we recently ran an initiative around feature flag cleanups and full rollouts that we tracked religiously during our weekly OpEx review – without which we probably would not have had the same success with that cleanup initiative.
I understand your cynicism with "yet another framework" but (and I know I'm biased) this framework is intimately tied to ops reviews as a mechanism for both measurement and organizational change.
Dev productivity metrics frameworks are (and always have been, IMO) bad for measuring organizational effectiveness. Operational Excellence reviews are the future of measuring and improving organizational health, and I wrote a paper making the case for this + a framework that helps make the OE review effective.
(Shameless plug) – founder of https://www.cortex.io (YC W20) here! We build an off-the-shelf developer portal. Backstage is great if you have lots of time/very niche requirements, but most of our users need a system that "just works" to drive ownership/best practices without adding a ton of overhead
The framework is explicitly titled "Measuring developer productivity with the DX Core 4". Diffs/engineer, even if not at the individual level, is still meant as a proxy for individual throughput. The question they are trying to answer is "how do we make Ganesh X% more productive?"
My argument is that that is the wrong question to be trying to optimize for, regardless of how you measure it. It also does not capture the risk dimensions with AI adoption (and the reduction in humans-in-the-loop) which my paper tries to directly address.