How Doppler aligns with your SPACE framework

Developed by a team of researchers from Github, Microsoft Research, and the University of Victoria as an alternative and addendum to the DORA metrics, the SPACE Framework is more evaluation philosophy than it is strict guidelines. The framework is designed to cover the wide range of factors affecting developer well-being and productivity while acknowledging the difficulties that arise when extrapolating from conventional metrics.

Effectively implementing the SPACE Framework involves asking your team if its current developer evaluation covers each of the SPACE categories and equipping them with the right tools and training to grow. In this article, we’ll cover each metric and how they interact with productivity.

Satisfaction and well-being

According to the SPACE team’s research, developer satisfaction correlates with other markers of a productive, thriving environment. Metrics measuring health and well-being are essential in reducing burnout (caused by excessive and prolonged workplace stress) and its associated productivity loss. This doesn’t mean comfy chairs and more workplace snacks, though. A key part of developer satisfaction is ensuring developers have the right tools to do their jobs on reasonable timelines.

How Doppler helps: According to Bitwarden’s 2024 Developer Survey, more than half of respondents spent ten or more hours a week on secrets management, and 60% were managing more than 100 secrets each. Searching for values or debugging mismatched or missing secrets is tedious and frustrating. Even worse, the reason secrets management takes so much time is because their tools are insufficient for developer use.

The combination of a large number of secrets and inefficient secrets management tools causes immense frustration. Instead, developers want solutions that are efficient, integrate quickly and immediately into their workflow, and are secure by design.

Doppler is a developer-first secrets management solution designed for security, efficiency, and developer satisfaction. Doppler’s single source of truth reduces the time spent tracking down secrets within a greater sprawl, and its suite of integrations connects to your team’s workflow painlessly. Equipping your team with the tools to succeed is critical to improving developer satisfaction and well-being.

Performance

This metric is particularly challenging to quantify. Sure, a developer may output many lines of code, but are they producing high-quality code? This isn’t always clear. Does high-quality code lead to positive business outcomes measurably? Can user satisfaction surveys recognize it? Performance metrics are essential but fail to paint an accurate picture if taken in isolation. Some performance indicators include quality (reliability, absence of bugs) and impact (customer retention and satisfaction, feature usage, cost reduction).

How Doppler helps: Integrating Doppler CLI into your local development environment replaces the need for manually updating and syncing secrets within and across the development team. This prevents mismatched or outdated secrets from causing production failure and prevents further wasted time spent debugging a problem that shouldn’t exist.

Activity

Activity usually refers to the count of actions or outputs of developers and teams. This metric can be misleading in highly connected teams where developers often collaborate to solve issues plaguing each other’s code. Additionally, a high action count does not indicate the significance of those actions themselves. Still, measuring the activity of developers in conjunction with other metrics can help point teams to questions they should be asking. If a specific part of the workflow behaves as a bottleneck, management can look into where resources are being used and divert activity to this under-resourced area.

How Doppler helps: Doppler reduces frustration and interruptions that lead to decreased activity by merging directly into your workflow with a whole host of integrations. A streamlined secrets management process removes obstacles that prevent higher activity. To see how it could benefit your team, take a look at how features like automated secrets rotation and platform-wide instant synchronization can reduce time spent on secrets management every week.

Time saved in secrets management frees developers to work on the parts of projects that should matter, like developing new features or reviewing code commits, leading to more frequent and functional deployments.

Communication and collaboration

Software development is a collaborative and creative task that benefits significantly from effective communication. Teams that effectively collaborate may see a decrease in developer personal productivity at the benefit of producing a tremendous net result split among those they collaborated with. More effective communication helps identify the correct problems to tackle, brainstorm novel solutions, and choose more effective solutions between alternatives. Collaboration is more than just communication! It also includes equipping your team with the right tools to work together effectively.

How Doppler Helps: Doppler’s features reduce obstacles in several areas, leading to more space for intentional communication and collaboration. User Groups quickly and efficiently allow access to resources as needed so collaborative spaces can be created and updated quickly and without significant risk.

Doppler’s Change Requests are a collaborative tool enabling documented, accessible review and expediting the approval of changes involving secrets and secrets access. Requests that update secrets are organized in the Change Request list, where they can be reviewed before being approved, canceled, or applied. Doppler's automatic syncing features mean that applied change requests are automatically updated across the platform and organization, eliminating the time spent manually updating secrets after approved changes.

Each alteration made using change requests is recorded in Doppler’s activity logs, allowing teams to identify what changes were made when they were made, and by whom they were approved and applied. If erroneous changes are made, Doppler also enables fast reversion to previous functional builds.

Efficiency and flow

Efficiency and Flow refer to the ability to make progress without interruptions or delay, referencing the ‘state of flow’ in which developers agree they generate their best work. Efficiency often comes from well-designed systems and schedules, where focused work time is built into the development cycle to create opportunities to enter the flow state. Effective communication and collaboration help move projects along with minimal delays. This involves removing duplicated work, rework, or other ‘development waste’ endemic to teams with poor communication and planning.

How Doppler Helps: Entering a flow state, as anyone could tell you, requires participating in an activity without distractions. It’s tough to enter or engage in a state of Flow during a task if it’s routinely interrupted by something that isn’t a part of the task, like asking a coworker to send a specific secret so you can test the build you’re working on, or spending hours debugging code just to identify that a value in your .env file is out of date. Removing obstacles increases the propensity of efficient work days and the ‘flow states’ within them.

Doppler's incredibly secure nature is as essential as removing the waste of improper secrets management services and techniques. Doppler’s single source of truth ensures the right people and only the right people have access to secrets.

Make sure your team is equipped with the right tools to improve its SPACE framework posture and level up productivity, well-being, and output. Whether that means freeing up time by streamlining secrets management or improving security to prevent disruptions from data breaches, Doppler is ready to help. Doppler’s flexible plans fit your needs—try a demo and learn more.