Explore the Q3 2022 BlueOptima Global Benchmark. Analyze trends in coding effort, quality across sectors like Tech, and the rise of YAML in enterprise.

BlueOptima Global Benchmark Report: Quarter 3, 2022

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BlueOptima Global Benchmark Report: Quarter 3, 2022

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.

Quarter 3 Key Insights

The analysis within this report deliberately excludes part-time and hobbyist software developers, such as 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

Overall, global trends have shifted this quarter with previous declines being counteracted by a slight improvement of ~0.3% for the quarter (Q3 2022). Although this is a slight change, it suggests that perhaps productivity is stabilising globally. Whereas code quality has seen a marginal decrease of approximately 0.1% globally. However, both quality and productivity seem to be reasonably stable for now.

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‍Caption: Global trends for productivity (hrs) and quality (%) for Q3 2022

Economic Sector Performance

This quarter, almost every sector experienced a drop in productivity compared to the previous quarter. The only exception was Technology where there was negligible change in productivity. Quality across the sectors fared similar results with a marginal decrease of approximately ~0.3 percentage points across every sector.

The Technology sector is yet again the most productive among all the economic sectors having seen an increase of ~2.06% productivity in comparison to the last quarter, Q2 2022. BlueOptima’s data shows that over the past year there has been a continuous improvement in the productivity of the Technology sector with an average of a ~1.7 percentage point increase.

Sector Breakdown (Developer Count):

Regional Performance

This quarter, the BlueOptima Global Benchmark showed that Asia-Pacific (excl. India), consisting of 4.3M developers, was the most productive region. The second and third highest ranking regions for productivity were Eastern Europe with 1.8M developers and Western Europe with 2M developers respectively. The region to show the greatest improvement for the quarter (Q3 2022) was Western Europe with a productivity gain of approximately ~3%. Whereas the region producing the most maintainable code was Eastern Europe who holds 8% of the BlueOptima global total for developers. Overall, historical BlueOptima Global Benchmark data demonstrates less fluctuations within regional performance in regard to productivity and quality.

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‍Caption: Regional performance across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Americas

Regional Developer Populations:

Top Enterprise Technologies Breakdown

Source code language families employed in enterprises move slowly, Java continues to top the charts as the most commonly used language in enterprise software development, as it has for several years. This equates to over a fifth of Coding Effort (CE) delivered globally within our sample at roughly 23%.

Interestingly, over the past 12 months the BlueOptima Global Benchmark data has shown that the global usage of YAML has overtaken XML for enterprise software development. YAML currently accounts for nearly ~6.8% of global enterprise usage.

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‍Caption: Distribution of enterprise software development language usage in Q3 2022

Language Proportion of Coding Effort (%):

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 quarters 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 more than 32,000 based in India, 10,000 based in North America, 8,000 based in Western Europe, 4000 based in Eastern Europe, 4,000 based in the APAC region (excl. India & China), 3,000 based in China, and 2,000 based in Latin America and the Caribbean. 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.

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.

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 the 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.

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.

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 at:

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