More productive, developers have favored teleworking in 2021

Developer productivity is returning to pre-pandemic levels, but the workplace itself is changing, Github revealed in recent research. Released on November 16, the 2021 State of the Octoverse report is based on data pulled from more than four million repositories and surveys of more than 12,000 developers. Regarding productivity, GitHub, the company noted that pull requests, an indicator of changes to features, returned to a level of fusion similar to 2019, with a strong acceleration for enterprise projects. However, she points out that pull requests were merged 25% slower than in 2020.

The platform also observed that 46% of developers who work in teams, now expect to work entirely remotely or in a hybrid environment. Only 11% plan to return to the office, down 30% from the 41% who previously worked onsite. Before the pandemic, 28.1% of respondents worked in a hybrid environment. Today, 47.6% expect to work in this mode after the pandemic. Regarding 100% remote work, 26.5% worked in this way. Now, 38.8% of respondents want to work completely remotely.

Tenfold performance

Among other lessons, automation is gaining traction with developers. Indeed, the study shows that the performance of development teams can increase by 87% when reusing code and by 43% when automating. Software delivery automation, or continuous integration and development (CI/CD), is a key part of open source and allows teams to scale faster, GitHub said. “By eliminating friction and repetitive tasks through automation, teams perform 27% better in open source and 43% better for enterprise projects, and developers say they are more satisfied,” GitHub notes in its report. .

The report gives other conclusions, in particular on the most used languages, the number of contributors or even on the best practices. Note that JavaScript (the most used language) and Python (2^e most used language since 2019) remain the main languages, followed by Java (overtaken by Python in 2019) and TypeScript (increasing use since 2017). GitHub had 16 million new contributors to open source projects this year for a total of 73 million developers on GitHub. Note that 84% of companies in the top 100 Fortunes use GitHub Enterprise.

Know the best practices

The report states that productivity increases by 11% when developers have an easy-to-search team directory. It increases by 50% when the documentation is up to date, both for open source projects and for enterprise projects. Mentoring is also seen as a valuable asset both in open source projects and in companies. “Best practices yield long-term benefits in terms of retention and productivity,” it says.

This is how the platform offers some tips for developers and businesses. “Implement automation to give your team more time for creativity and teamwork”, “invest in documentation, regardless of format, to build team confidence”, “create a collaborative environment by facilitating the reuse of other people’s code” or “use codes of conduct in open source to create a feeling of security”. So many points that ultimately allow you to move forward in a project and be more productive, a valuable asset.