Delivery Index: How to Measure Development Velocity Without Lines of Code
· 9 min read
Fred Brooks warned in The Mythical Man-Month (1975) that measuring programmer productivity by volume of code is a trap: adding more code isn't the same as adding more value. Fifty years later, some organizations still equate lines written with work done. The SPACE framework (Forsgren et al., 2021) explicitly cautions against single-dimensional activity metrics — yet the need they address is real: how do you measure whether your engineering team is delivering?
The answer isn't another vanity metric. It's a composite signal we call the Delivery Index.