LinkedIn has made its Developer Productivity and Happiness Framework open source, just in time to help with your New Year's Resolution, whether that's to be more productive or to be happier. You're bound to have one of the two on your list of things you'll give up on halfway through January.

In a blog post with the annoying title of "Practical Magic: Improving Productivity and Happiness for Software Development Teams",  LinkedIn's Max Kanat-Alexander said the framework consists of a collection of documents that describe the systems, processes, metrics, and feedback systems LinkedIn uses to understand their developers and their needs internally at LinkedIn.

The framework is designed to answer the question of how to make developers happy and productive, and Kanat-Alexander says the company has found that the best way to answer this question is through data, usually meaning metrics and feedback systems. Over the last four years, LinkedIn has invested both time and resources to create a set of guidelines on how to design such a framework, starting from the high-level philosophy of how to think about the problem and getting down to specific best practices for implementers of data pipelines.

The framework describes its high-level philosophy - Goals, Signals, and Metrics, then discusses Developer Personas, a system LinkedIn developed for categorizing developers into different groups based on their workflows, and thinking about priorities separately for each of those groups. I'm sure we can all think of a few categories for this when things are going wrong on a wet Wednesday. It also describes LinkedIn's concept of Persona Champions, who are "volunteers from across the engineering organization who understand the workflows and pain points for these engineers and can share those insights for consideration and incorporation into the system".

The framework also includes important principles for avoiding systems that will require tons of rework, and what data you should collect (including some thoughts about data schemas for engineering data).

LinkedIn's Developer Productivity and Happiness Framework is available now on GitHub. You have been warned.

More Information

DPH Framework On GitHub

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