GitHub: Dev productivity is back to pre-pandemic levels

Developer productivity is returning to pre-pandemic levels, but the workplace itself is shifting, GitHub has revealed in recent research.

In GitHub’s “2021 State of the Octoverse” research, the company observes that pull requests this year were merged fastest at work, almost twice as fast as for open source projects. The research also showed that pull requests at work were merged 25 percent slower than last year. 

However, when comparing the previous two years, GitHub sees signs that work rhythm is returning to pre-pandemic levels. GitHub also found that 46 percent of developers who worked collocated with teammates now expect to work fully remotely or in a hybrid environment. Only 11 percent expect to go back to working collocated.

Published November 16, GitHub’s 2021 report on software development activity is based on data culled from more than four million repositories and surveys of more than 12,000 developers. This approach to its research enables GitHub to offer “predictive” results, the company said.

Elsewhere in its research, GitHub found that development team performance can increase as much as 87 percent when reusing code and as much as 43 percent when using automation. The automation of software delivery, or continuous integration and continuous delviery (CI/CD), is a key enabler in open source and letting teams go faster at scale, GitHub said.

Other findings in GitHub’s “2021 State of the Octoverse” report:

• JavaScript and Python remain the top languages, followed by Java and TypeScript.
• GitHub had 1.4 million new contributors to open source this year.
• Productivity is increased by 11 percent when developers have a team repo that is easy to search.
• Productivity rises by 50 percent when documentation is up-to-date, in both open source and enterprise projects.
• Mentorship is a valuable asset in both open source projects and companies.