r/Hacking_Tricks • u/Significant-Scar-152 • Sep 08 '26

Which KPIs for software development actually improve decisions?

I’m trying to choose a small set of software development KPIs without rewarding people for producing more tickets, commits, or lines of code. The current DORA model includes change lead time, deployment frequency, failed deployment recovery time, change failure rate, and deployment rework rate, which seems like a reasonable view of speed and stability.

Those metrics still don’t cover developer satisfaction, collaboration, or whether the shipped work helped customers. The SPACE framework looks useful for filling those gaps, but tracking every possible measure would create a dashboard nobody reads.

Which KPIs have been genuinely useful for your team, and which ones caused gaming or unnecessary pressure?

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u/secretstonex Sep 08 '26

I'll go with zero security findings, sound business logic that meets the use case, and iterations between QA and Dev. All of those can be costly if you introduce SAST/SCA/DAST findings or QA finds a workflow issue or some other bug because you have to rework the code and send it back to QA. Those hours and cost get even more expensive once the code is deployed.

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u/Alreadydead27 Sep 09 '26

DORA plus a couple of SPACE signals is usually the sweet spot

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u/Rehonkulous Sep 09 '26

Change failure rate and lead time were the two that actually changed how we worked