How Flip moved beyond DORA metrics with DX

Flip’s engineering leadership team has always looked for ways to measure and understand developer productivity. Before using DX, Flip’s engineering leaders focused primarily on DORA metrics but found them lacking in providing actionable insights.

“The DORA metrics are a good start, but they don’t tell us a lot about what’s actually going on,” says Suryawirawan. “Things like how difficult processes are, or the quality of our work and collaboration, are more difficult to gauge.”

By using DX, Flip was able to get a combined view of qualitative and quantitative sociotechnical measures that provided both the “what” and the “why” of factors affecting developer productivity. Armed with these insights, the leadership at Flip was able to clearly identify their highest-impact priorities, such as improving build processes, test reliability, documentation, and requirements quality.

In addition to providing insights to leadership, DX enables individual teams at Flip to make improvements as well. Teams are encouraged to leverage DX data to identify focus areas and include them in their quarterly roadmaps. “DX gives us a systematic approach to improving productivity. It helps us figure out how we’re doing as an engineering organization and what initiatives we can focus on next to improve our developer experience.”