HX/ the human experience framework
01 · Why HX, why now

From DORA to HX

HX is a successor, not a rebuttal. This page is the argument in full: what the great frameworks of the last decade established, what changed underneath them when agents arrived, and why reading AI-era work honestly takes a new instrument.

What we stand on

Three frameworks taught the industry to see its own work

HX keeps their discipline and their findings. Everything on this site is built on them — cite them, keep running them, and hold HX to their standard.

DORA2014 →
Asked“Is our software delivery healthy?”
Gave usThe four keys — deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change-failure rate, time to restore — and the finding that speed and stability are allies, not rivals.
ReadsPipeline telemetry: deployments, incidents, changes.
Built when delivery was the bottleneck worth watching — and it read that bottleneck brilliantly.
SPACE2021
Asked“What is developer productivity, really?”
Gave usFive dimensions — satisfaction & well-being, performance, activity, communication & collaboration, efficiency & flow — and the standing warning that no single metric can carry the answer.
ReadsSystem metrics plus periodic surveys.
Built when the human dimension was the missing column, and perception first became admissible data.
DX Core 42024
Asked“Can this be one deployable standard?”
Gave usSpeed, effectiveness, quality, and impact — DORA, SPACE, and the DevEx research unified into a benchmarkable four that a board can read.
ReadsMixed telemetry and self-report, benchmarked across organizations.
Standardized the decade's learning — in the same year the ground began to move under it.
Then the ground moved

Two things happened that no prior framework was designed for

Between 2024 and 2026, the day-to-day of engineering changed shape: much of the work now happens as sessions with AI agents. That broke two assumptions every earlier instrument was built on.

1

A new primary source appeared

For as long as we've measured software work, there were two kinds of evidence: artifacts — commits, pull requests, deployments, tickets — which record what happened; and surveys, which record how it felt, weeks later, on average. Sessions are a third kind: a verbatim record of how the work actually went. What was asked, what was tried, what failed, where it stalled — the reasoning, not just the result.

Frameworks built before this record existed measure around it: their unit of analysis is the artifact or the quarter. HX's unit of analysis is the session.

In an agentic organization, artifacts are the receipts; sessions are the reasoning. Instruments that read only receipts explain less every quarter.

2

The loop can finally close

Measurement used to live beside the work — an analytics silo fed by exports, read in reviews, acted on by memo. That was a tooling limitation, not a law of nature, and the agent era removes it: when work is conducted on a platform that can also read the work, a finding can return to the next session — as coaching, a better prompt, a fixed process — while the context is still warm.

HX therefore requires what earlier frameworks could only recommend: measure inside the system of work, and close the loop where the work happens.

An insight that has to travel between systems usually dies on the way. One that returns to the next session compounds.

Continuity and break

What HX keeps, what HX changes

HX keeps
  • Outcomes over activity. DORA's discipline, kept as a house rule: no activity leaderboards, ever.
  • The multidimensional view. SPACE's five dimensions echo in CARE's four questions; no single number carries the answer.
  • Felt experience as data. The survey tradition, kept honest: every check-in earns a visible outcome.
  • Deployable definitions. Core 4's lesson: a framework spreads when its numbers are publicly specified.
HX changes
  • The unit of analysis. From artifacts and quarters to the working session — a human and their agents, together.
  • The cadence. From quarterly recall to a continuous record, with felt check-ins on the person's terms.
  • The consent model. From a policy appendix to constitutive architecture: covenant, aggregates, access log.
  • The home. From an analytics silo to the system of work itself, so insight returns to the next session.
FrameworkYearUnit of analysisPrimary evidenceCadenceConsent
DORA2014The delivery pipelineDeploy & incident telemetryContinuous telemetry, annual readingNot needed — it measures machines
SPACE2021The developer & the teamTelemetry + periodic surveysQuarterly, typicallyGuidance, not architecture
DX Core 42024The engineering organizationMixed telemetry + self-reportQuarterly benchmarkPolicy-level
HX2026The working session — a human and their agentsThe work's own record + felt signalsContinuous record; check-ins on the person's termsConstitutive: charter, k≥5 aggregates, access log
The claim, precisely

Successor, with care

DORA is not wrong. SPACE is not obsolete. Core 4 is not misguided. Each read the best evidence of its decade — and the decade turned. When most of the work happens in conversation with agents, the richest evidence of how work is going is the conversation itself, and none of the prior instruments can read it, because none was built when it existed. HX is the framework for the era in which the work writes itself down.

What HX does not claim
  • ✕That delivery metrics are obsolete. Keep the four keys — they read the pipeline well. HX reads what they can't.
  • ✕That measurement alone improves anything. HX requires the loop: findings must return to the place work happens, or the reading is theater.
  • ✕That the covenant is optional. An implementation without the trust architecture isn't HX with caveats — it's monitoring with better fonts.
Read the framework →The second codebase