RESEARCH_FILE
Margaret-Anne Storey
University of Victoria
Known for:Research on developer experience, developer pain points, and the social dimensions of software engineering — including co-authorship of the SPACE framework
SEE THE PRACTICE
Turn a thought this research explains into one clear move.
THE THOUGHT
“He ships in a day what takes me a week”
YOUR RECORDED RESPONSE
“Different tickets, different codebases, different luck. The benchmark is invalid.”
ONE PRIVATE MOVE
Open a note and list three concrete differences between your last hard ticket and one fast-shipped task you noticed today: codebase age, unknowns, and dependencies. Keep it private and stop at three.
Key findings
- 2019
With Zimmermann, Storey surveyed 2,000 Microsoft developers and found interruptions and task-switching were the most commonly cited productivity impediment — more so than tool performance or code complexity — highlighting environmental and workflow factors as primary levers invisible to peer output comparisons. How Developers and Managers Define and Trade Productivity for Quality ↗
- 2021
As a co-author of the SPACE framework with Forsgren and colleagues, Storey argued that any single productivity metric — including velocity, lines of code, or ticket throughput — will systematically obscure at least four other independent dimensions of what makes a developer genuinely productive. The SPACE of Developer Productivity ↗