The LinkedIn DPH Framework

Welcome to the LinkedIn Developer Productivity and Happiness Framework!

At LinkedIn, we have a fairly advanced system for understanding our developers, the success of our engineering work, and where we should focus our infrastructure efforts to be most effective.

This repository contains the documents that describe this system. They are mostly direct copies of the internal documents that our own engineers read to understand how this works.

This document set explains how to define metrics and feedback systems for software developers, how to get action taken on that data, and provides examples of a few internal metrics that we use.

You can read the documents in any order. Each one is designed to be able to be read and referenced independently. However, we provide a suggested sequence and hierarchy here:

• Goals, Signals, and Metrics: A Framework for Defining Metrics
  • Goals, Signals, and Metrics
  • Developer Productivity & Happiness Goals and Signals
• Developer Personas: A system for categorizing and understanding developers
  • Developer Personas
  • Persona Champions
• Guidelines for Teams Who Create Metrics and Feedback Systems
  • Data vs Insights
  • Qualitative vs Quantitative Measurements
  • Audiences: Always Know Who Your Data is For
  • Driving Decisions With Data
  • Data Collection Principles
• Quantitative Metrics: General Tips and Guidelines
  • Principles and Guidelines for Metric Design
  • Common Pitfalls When Designing Metrics
  • What’s wrong with “scores?”
  • Metrics and Performance Reviews
• Example Metrics
  • Productivity Concepts for Software Developers
  • Example Metrics
  • Why Did We Choose Our Metrics?

Forking, Modifying, and Contributing

We have made the DPH Framework open-source so that you can fork, modify, and re-use these documents however you wish, as long as you respect the license that is on the repository. You can see the source in our GitHub repo.

We welcome community contributions that help move forward the state of the art in understanding software developers across the entire software industry. If there’s something missing in the documents that you’d like to see added, feel free to file an issue via GitHub Issues! If you just have questions or a discussion you’d like to have, participate in our GitHub Discussions.

And of course, if you want to contribute new text or improvements to the existing text, we welcome your contributions! Keep in mind that we hold this framework to a very high standard—we want it to be validated by real experience in the software industry, generally applicable across a wide range of software development environments, and assure that additional inputs are both interesting and accessible to a broad audience. If you think you have content that meets that bar and fits in with these documents, we would love to have your contribution! If you’re not sure, start a discussion or just send us a PR and we can discuss it.

License

The LinkedIn Developer Productivity & Happiness Framework is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Copyright © 2023 LinkedIn Corporation

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