Explore the BlueOptima Global Benchmark Report for Q4 2024. Gain insights into developer productivity and code quality trends across industries like Healthcare and Financials, regional performance in North America and Asia-Pacific, and the growth of enterprise technologies like YAML and Terraform.

BlueOptima Global Benchmark Report: Quarter 4, 2024

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BlueOptima Global Benchmark Report: Quarter 4, 2024

Welcome to the BlueOptima Global Benchmark (BGB) Report

Welcome to the BlueOptima Global Benchmark (BGB) Report which provides insights into key trends from across the software development industry. This Report is published quarterly, 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, explicitly changing static source code metrics and the context within which that output was delivered and then benchmarking that against all other developers. Large global enterprises use Coding Effort to compare the productivity of software engineers across technologies and software development methodologies, delivering actionable insights to optimise the software development lifecycle.

Alongside productivity, software developers’ maintainability of source code changes is 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.

Quarter 4 Key Insights

Global Trends

The BlueOptima Global Benchmark data highlights a slight decrease of approximately 1.06% in developer productivity for Q4 2024 compared to Q3 (1.83 → 1.81). Additionally, code maintainability has increased fractionally as quality reaches 93.62%, which remains near the lower end of the range observed over the last year. Comparing 2023 Q4 to 2024 Q4, productivity levels have remained virtually unchanged, with only a slight decrease of 0.01%.

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BlueOptima Global Benchmark Trends 2024

Sector Breakdown: Economic Sector Performance

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Healthcare (1.6m Developers)

This sector saw a small but significant increase in developers’ productivity of 1.54% in Q4 2024 (1.95 → 1.98). Code maintainability increased by 0.16% in Q4 2024 (93.85% → 94.00%). Over the last 12 months, this appears to be the highest quarter for productivity in the healthcare sector.

Technology (2.3m Developers)

This sector saw a slight decrease in developer productivity of 1.52% in Q4 2024 (1.97 → 1.94). Code maintainability saw a slight increase of 0.02% in Q4 2024 (93.31% → 93.33%).

Financials (8.7m Developers)

This sector remained unchanged in developer productivity at 1.73 in Q4 2024. They saw a slight decrease in code maintainability of 0.04% (93.78% → 93.74%).

Regional Performance

Asia-Pacific and India

North America

Latin America & Caribbean (GRULAC)

Europe

Top Enterprise Technologies Breakdown Q4 2024

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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 instances of underreported productivity due to extended absences. Previous quarter data has been recalculated in this report to ensure statistically justifiable comparisons using the same methodology.

BlueOptima Population Sample

This report leverages models and analysis built on the BlueOptima dataset, containing activities of over 730,000 developers and more than 171 Billion static metrics changes.

Global Software Developer Population Estimates

About BlueOptima

BlueOptima’s analytics platform empowers software developers and their companies to create better software in the most time and cost‑efficient way. We provide SaaS technology that objectively measures software development efficiency. Our core productivity and code maintainability metrics allow executives to make data-driven decisions related to talent optimisation, vendor management, location strategy, and more. BlueOptima is proven to identify savings of up to 20% for software budgets.

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