Ukraine: The Impact of Conflict

In this article, we’ll take a look at how the conflict has impacted one of the key global software development centres.

Ukraine Led The Way

Before the conflict, Ukraine was considered one of the highest performing developer regions in both productivity and quality, generally outperforming the global average of productivity by 20%.

The Main Development Centres

Background

Within Ukraine there are approximately 200,000 software developers, with major concentrations in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Dnipro, and Odessa.

On the 24th February 2022, the Russian Government initiated a military invasion in Ukraine. Whilst Russia expected to overrun the key political centres of Ukraine within days, by the end of March, limited progress had been made, although the widespread devastation had caused over 5 million Ukrainian internationals to flee the country, and destroyed thousands of commercial and residential properties.

As of writing (20th April 2022), Lviv has seen some limited exposure to the Russian invasion, with Odessa climbing down from high alert, whilst Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipro continue to be severely disrupted in day-to-day operations.

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BlueOptima Findings: The Resilience of Ukraine

Figure 2 shows the productivity of Ukraine during the time leading up to, and just after the conflict of 2022. It is unsurprising to see an immediate drop in the days following the invasion. However, surprisingly Ukraine’s speed of recovery shows how quickly developers have adapted to the new environments. The fact that productivity has returned to previous levels so quickly is a testament to the resilience of the Ukrainian people. It should be noted that this only includes developers who have been active throughout the conflict. We are not yet able to examine the impact probability of those who have become inactive since February returning to producing code.

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Whilst the overall productivity remains consistent, the quality of code being committed has also remained relatively stable, with only slight drops compared to the average.

Active Developers

Despite the resilience shown in both productivity and quality of Ukrainian developers, there is one final point that bears scrutiny, the number of active developers.

In Figure 4, we can see a decrease in the number of developers who committed to code repositories in the first few days of the invasion. This was followed by a slight recovery as the invasion stalled, with another significant drop later in March 2022. Overall, this indicates that Ukrainian developers are most likely either leaving the country, or are not in a position to carry out their roles anymore. Previous examples of conflict would suggest that there will be significant disruption and rebuilding for many years after the conflict comes to an end. NB. The initial uptick in active developer counts at the beginning of January can be attributed to the normal return to work period that follows each winter holiday.

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Conclusions

The level of resiliency shown by Ukrainian developers is indicative of a very adaptable and focused workforce. Whilst the conflict has severely disrupted day-to-day working practices, they are still managing to perform well. What is not clear yet, is whether this initial resiliency will be maintained over time, or as seen in the COVID-19 analysis, see significant drops in productivity deferred by several months. Over the next weeks and months, we will continue to monitor the situation and provide updates on the state of software development in Ukraine.

What is Productivity?

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. CE is a metric derived from objective measures of software developer work outputs, specifically source code changes, based on decades of academic and industry research. Coding Effort is used by large global enterprises to compare the productivity of software engineers across technologies and software development methodologies.

Who are BlueOptima?

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 more.

Contact the Data Science Team

To discover powerful insights and determine areas of improvement specific to your organisation, reach out to our Data Science team and explore our custom analytics solutions at: [email protected]

Contact us

Phone: +44 207 100 8740
Website: www.blueoptima.com
Email: [email protected]

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