The Elevate Framework
A behavioural model for engineering productivity and quality
Engineering productivity is multidimensional. No single metric captures whether a team is truly performing well. Velocity without quality creates technical debt. Quality without collaboration creates bottlenecks. Collaboration without resilience creates fragility.
The Elevate Framework addresses this by measuring engineering performance across six interconnected pillars. Each pillar captures a distinct dimension of team health, and together they provide a complete picture of how an engineering organisation is actually performing.
Built on the foundations of DORA and SPACE, Elevate extends these established frameworks with additional dimensions they don't cover: code quality as a leading indicator, onboarding effectiveness, and individual progression over time.
The Six Pillars
Each pillar captures a distinct dimension of team health.
Velocity & Throughput
Speed and efficiency of software delivery. How fast teams move from idea to production while maintaining sustainable pace.
Code Quality
Maintainability, reliability, and technical excellence of the codebase. The leading indicator of future delivery performance.
Operational Resilience
System reliability, failure handling, and recovery speed. How well the team handles the unexpected.
Collaboration & Flow
Team effectiveness and process smoothness. How well people work together and how work moves through the system.
Onboarding & Enablement
How quickly new team members become productive and how well the team supports continuous learning.
Progression by Craft
Individual growth, skill development, and engineering excellence over time. Sustainable performance through career development.
How to Measure Each Pillar
Concrete metrics and goals for tracking progress across all six dimensions.
Velocity & Throughput
Velocity accelerates time-to-market, enabling faster delivery, adaptability, and greater value from existing resources. While speed drives productivity and revenue, Elevate ensures quality by balancing velocity with metrics like defect rates and resilience, so faster delivery doesn’t mean faster failure.
How to measure
Deployment Frequency
How often the team delivers software to users. An indicator of throughput and agility.
Lead Time to Changes
Time from code committed to code running in production. Measures the speed of the delivery pipeline.
Code Quality
Quality issues hurt the business. Critical bugs can lead to customer dissatisfaction, lost revenue, and brand damage. Poor code quality also slows development, making new features harder to deliver. Investing in quality protects revenue, builds trust, and boosts engineering efficiency by reducing rework.
How to measure
Escaped Defect Rate
Percentage of bugs that reach production without being caught during development or testing.
Comprehensive Testing Trophy
Balance of unit, integration, and end-to-end tests following the testing trophy model for maximum confidence with minimal fragility.
Operational Resilience
Operational resilience matters because downtime impacts revenue and trust. Whether it’s lost sales from an e-commerce outage or churn in B2B due to service instability, reliability is critical. Metrics like uptime and recovery time give leaders confidence and offer early warnings.
How to measure
Change Failure Rate
Percentage of deployments that cause a failure in production requiring remediation (rollback, hotfix, or patch).
Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)
Average time to restore service after an incident or outage. Measures how quickly the team can respond and fix issues.
Uptime
Percentage of time the service is available and functioning correctly for end users.
Collaboration & Flow
Efficient collaboration and flow boost productivity by removing roadblocks, not by working harder. Smooth hand-offs, quick feedback (like faster PR reviews), and shared context speed up delivery and reduce errors. This leads to better throughput, less wasted time, and higher team morale.
How to measure
PR Cycle Time
Total time from pull request opened to merged. Encompasses review wait time, feedback loops, and approval latency.
Work in Progress
Number of concurrent tasks or pull requests a team is actively working on. High WIP signals context-switching and bottlenecks.
Focus on Delivering Value
Ratio of time spent on feature work and improvements versus unplanned work, meetings, and process overhead.
Onboarding & Enablement
Onboarding and enablement are key to unlocking the ROI of hiring. Faster ramp-up means new engineers deliver value sooner, while clear processes and good tooling prevent wasted time and frustration. Effective enablement boosts retention, scales teams smoothly, and ensures all engineers can work efficiently.
How to measure
Time to First Deploy
How long it takes a new hire to ship their first change to production. A proxy for onboarding friction and documentation quality.
Full Productivity Ramp-up
Time until a new team member reaches the sustained output level of an established contributor.
Progression by Craft
Progression by Craft boosts long-term engineering productivity by growing talent from within. Investing in skill development and clear career paths leads to higher retention, better innovation, and a strong leadership pipeline. It’s often more effective than external hiring and helps teams stay current, engaged, and resilient.
How to measure
Internal Promotion Rate
Percentage of senior and leadership roles filled by internal promotions versus external hires.
Engineering Satisfaction
Team sentiment around growth opportunities, tooling, autonomy, and craft mastery. Typically measured via periodic surveys.
How Elevate Relates to DORA and SPACE
Building on proven foundations, not replacing them.
DORA
Provides four validated delivery metrics. Elevate encompasses these within the Velocity and Resilience pillars, then adds four dimensions DORA doesn't measure.
SPACE
Describes productivity as multidimensional. Elevate operationalises this insight into specific, measurable behaviours that teams can track and improve.
Elevate
Builds on both. Adds code quality, onboarding, and progression. Connects every pillar to observable GitHub behaviours. Designed to drive action, not just measurement.
Dive deeper into the research
Read the full whitepaper to understand the evidence behind each pillar.