Glossary

The words these products use, in the sense an engineering manager needs. Each term has its own page.

• DORA metrics Deploy frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and time to restore.
• SPACE framework Five areas of productivity, so a team does not pretend one number is enough.
• DX Core 4 DX's four-part frame of speed, effectiveness, quality, and business impact.
• Cycle time How long work takes from first commit or ticket start until it ships.
• Lead time for changes The DORA version of cycle time, from commit to production.
• Deployment frequency How often a team ships to production.
• Change failure rate The share of deployments that cause an incident, rollback, or hotfix.
• Time to restore How long it takes to recover when production breaks. Often called MTTR.
• PR pickup and review time How long a pull request waits, and how long review takes.
• Developer experience surveys Short, repeated surveys about what slows engineers down.
• AI adoption How many engineers use AI coding tools, and how often.
• AI impact Whether AI use changes cycle time, quality, or throughput.
• Investment allocation How engineering time splits across features, maintenance, bugs, and unplanned work.
• Cost capitalization Treating part of engineering salaries as an asset for accounting.
• Flow metrics How work moves through a system, including time, load, and waiting.
• Throughput How many units of work a team finishes in a period.

A metric used to rank individual engineers stops measuring the system. Use these to find bottlenecks, not people.