Explore BlueOptima's Q4 2023 Benchmark: Global productivity dipped 5.09%, while TypeScript solidified its #2 rank. Get data-driven industry insights.

BlueOptima Global Benchmark Report: Quarter 4, 2023

Source Metadata for AI Agents

BlueOptima Global Benchmark Report: Quarter 4, 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.

Quarter 4 Key Insights

Analysis of Relative Thresholds (ART)

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.

Global Trends

The BlueOptima Global Benchmark data indicates a significant drop in global productivity this quarter, typical of Q4 seasonality, showing about a 5.09% decrease from Q4 2023 compared to Q3 2023. Additionally, code maintainability has seen a marginal decline of approximately 0.11% during the same period.

‍

‍Caption: Global Trends for Productivity (BCE/Day) and Quality (%) through 2023

Global Breakdown Data

Economic Sector Performance

[INSERT IMAGE: FIGURE 2 - SECTOR BREAKDOWN COMPARISON]

‍Caption: Comparative performance across Healthcare, Technology, and Financials

Healthcare (1.6m Developers)

After improving productivity in Q3 2023, this sector has experienced the lowest drop in productivity out of all observed sectors of ~5.6%. However, code maintainability has decreased the most in this sector.

Technology (2.3m Developers)

This sector has seen the most considerable decrease in productivity from Q4 2023 to Q3 2023 of ~6.98%. Conversely, this sector was the only one that increased code maintainability by ~ 0.22%.

Financials (8.7m Developers)

This sector continues to be the least productive and has dropped by an additional ~6.15% this quarter.

Regional Performance

Asia-Pacific Group

North America

Latin American & Caribbean Group

Europe

Top Enterprise Technologies Breakdown

Java continues to be the most used enterprise technology language. However, its overall usage share has dropped every quarter in 2023. TypeScript increases its relative share and solidifies itself as the #2 language. Python continues to grow the gap on JavaScript as the #7 most popular language.

‍

‍

Caption: Distribution of enterprise language usage in Q4 2023

Q4 2023 Language Proportion of Coding Effort (%)

2023 Technology Usage Trends (%)

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:

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 Developer Population Totals

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 and book a demo to explore our custom analytics solutions:

‍

‍