Explore BlueOptima's Q1 2023 Global Benchmark. Analyze trends in coding effort, quality across sectors like Tech and Healthcare, and language shifts.

BlueOptima Global Benchmark Report Q1 2023

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BlueOptima Global Benchmark Report: Quarter 1, 2023

Welcome to the BlueOptima Global Benchmark (BGB) Report which provides insights into key trends from across the software development industry.

The report provides a global view of the current trends of software development productivity. By consolidating the insights derived from analysis of source code changes delivered by hundreds of thousands of professional software developers working in enterprises located in more than 30 countries, the report provides a quantitative evaluation of their performance. This Report is published quarterly with each Report containing data from the preceding 12 months. The data is analysed using BlueOptima’s Developer Analytics platform to calculate Coding Effort (CE), which sets a global standard for measuring software developer productivity. Coding Effort is a metric derived from objectively measuring a software developer’s work outputs, specifically changes in static source code metrics, and the context within which that output was delivered then benchmarking that against all other developers.

Coding Effort is used by large global enterprises to compare the productivity of software engineers across technologies and software development methodologies to deliver actionable insights to optimise the software development lifecycle.

This quarter's key insights are:

Alongside productivity, the maintainability of source code changes delivered by software developers are measured using BlueOptima’s Analysis of Relative Thresholds (ART). Analysis of Relative Thresholds is an objective measure of source code maintainability obtained by using static source code metrics to evaluate how easy it is for a developer unfamiliar with the source code to deliver change into that source code. ART is described as ‘quality’ in this report. It is the proportion of Billable Coding Effort (BCE) hours spent delivering maintainable source code change.

The analysis within this report deliberately excludes part-time and hobbyist software developers. For example, those contributing to open source projects, as the economic cost and impact of their participation in these projects are indirect and unclear. The data employed in this analysis represents an approximated 2% sampling of the global enterprise software developer population.

BlueOptima’s further offerings around benchmarking and recruiting allow organisations to cost-optimise as early as possible in software initiatives. BlueOptima’s SaaS platform facilitates analysis of productivity, together with quality, in enterprise software development, in terms of individuals, teams, tasks, projects, divisions, and outsourced suppliers. Understanding variations in performance across an enterprise empowers managers to optimise efficiency. BlueOptima is proven to identify savings of up to 20% for software budgets.

Global Trends

The BlueOptima Global Benchmark data shows that overall global productivity has had a shift this quarter with results showing a ~0.7% decline in Q1 2023 compared to 2022 Q4. However, code maintainability has stabilised during the period.

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‍Caption: Global Breakdown of Productivity (BCE/Day) and Quality (%) from Q2 2022 to Q1 2023

Global Breakdown Data:

Economic Sector Performance

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Healthcare (1.6m Developers):This sector experienced a marginal drop of -1.4% in productivity this quarter, despite the previous three quarters showing an upward trend. In contrast, code quality has improved by 0.2%.

Technology (2.3m Developers):This sector was the most productive among all economic sectors after having seen an increase of ~2.8% productivity compared to last quarter. Whereas all other economic sectors (except technology) saw a decrease in productivity compared to last quarter.

Financials (8.7m Developers):

Industrials (0.8m Developers):

Regional Performance

Europe

Eastern Europe (1.8m Developers):The region with the most maintainable code and most productive developers in Q1 2023.

Western Europe (2.0m Developers):

North America

North America (4.6m Developers):

Asia-Pacific Group

India (4.0m Developers):This was the only region to experience an improvement in productivity for the quarter.

Asia-Pacific Group excl. India (4.3m Developers):This was the region to experience the greatest drop in productivity this quarter by ~7%.

Latin American & Caribbean Group (GRULAC)

GRULAC (1.9m Developers):

Top Enterprise Technologies Breakdown

Java continues to be the most highly used enterprise technology. However, over the past 12 months of data we can see that the global usage of XML has been taken over by YAML in enterprise software development with YAML currently accounting for nearly ~9.7% of the global usage. This quarter alone, YAML has increased by 1.7 percentage points compared to the last three quarters.

Language Proportion of Coding Effort (%) - Q1 2023:

Historical Proportion Trends (Q2 2022 - Q1 2023):

About the Report’s Data

Proration Methodology Changes

BlueOptima has made significant improvements to our proration logic, particularly when handling infrequent committers or those with an extended break from the code base. This change considerably reduces the instance of underreported productivity due to extended absences from working with a codebase. In order to ensure the comparison between the two quarters is statistically justifiable, the previous quarter's data has been recalculated in this report so both quarters are using the same proration methodology and hence a comparison on productivity can be made.

Analysis of Relative Thresholds (ART)

ART is a measure of the quality (specifically: maintainability) of source code. It is calculated by evaluating the proportion of code which is aberrant, relative to the codebase in which it sits. Code is flagged as aberrant when it violates certain internally benchmarked statistical thresholds, across a number of static source code metrics.

Global Software Developer Population

BlueOptima uses a sampling technique in calculating the performance of software engineers across various geographical regions and industries globally. BlueOptima has estimated the global software developer population using a combination of accredited sources and predictive modelling.

BlueOptima Population Sample

This report leverages models and analysis built on the BlueOptima dataset which contains activities of over 400,000 developers and more than 126 Billion static metrics changes. Detailed location, employment, and organisational data is available for:

The regions of Africa and the Middle East, which represent an estimated 6.8% of the global developer population, have been omitted from this analysis due to insufficient sample size. All data used is anonymised and aggregated.

Coding Effort

Coding Effort is calculated by statistically evaluating every source code change made by developers in terms of 36 static source code metrics measuring various aspects of Volume, Complexity, and Inter-relatedness while considering the context worked in e.g. a complex legacy software component or a brand new project.

Regional Population Estimates

Business Classification

The classification of organisations into Economic Sectors, Industry Groups, and Industries is done using The Refinitiv Business Classification. Estimates of the numbers of enterprise software developers in Economic Sectors, Industry Groups, and Industries is done by measuring various proxies of software developers in a firm (e.g. annual revenue, profit, assets, and headcount of each organisation) on a per industry basis and optimising estimation of this against the known developer population in a subset of those organisations that are known to BlueOptima. Once this industry level estimate is arrived at, constituents of the Global 2000 are evaluated and their developer populations estimated. The relative proportions of developers in Economic Sectors are then applied on a pro rata basis to the global software developer population.

Estimates of the total number of developers per region are derived from the following sources using a process of harmonising the data sources and arriving at a best-estimate across all sources: IDC Worldwide Developer Census, Evans Data Global Developer Population and Demographic Study, Stack Overflow State of European Tech, Statista, and World Bank Open Data.

Who are BlueOptima?

BlueOptima’s analytics platform empowers software developers and their companies to create better software in the most time and cost-efficient way. The first solution of its kind, BlueOptima provides insight based on the world’s only objective software developer productivity metrics: Coding Effort. It’s a breakthrough for software development.

We provide a SaaS technology that objectively measures software development efficiency. Our core metrics for productivity and code maintainability allow executives to make data driven decisions related to talent optimization, vendor management, location strategy and much more.

Contact Us

To discover powerful insights and determine areas of improvement specific to your organisation, reach out to our team and book a demo to explore our custom analytics solutions at:

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