GitHub’s annual Octoverse Report for 2021 explores how developers can improve their performance and well-being by developing code, creating documentation, and supporting communities in smarter, more sustainable ways.
The research combines telemetry from 4M+ repositories and surveys from more than 12,000 developers. Notably, Australian users on GitHub grew in 2021: 22.5% YoY growth for total users and 21.3% YoY growth for total active students.
Here are some of the key findings.
- Ditching the office – only about 11% of respondents expect to go back to working collocated, a 30% drop from 41% working in an office before
- Searchability matters – developers get an 11% productivity bump simply by having a team repo that is easy to search – a finding supported by earlier research as well
- Automation is key – using automation, teams perform 27% better in open source and 43% better at work, and developers report higher fulfilment
- More may not be merrier – too many contributors add to coordination costs and slows work down. For example, open source repositories with an average of 30 contributors close their pull requests in a day-or-less while those with an average of 65 contributors take three days or more to close a pull request, however…
- Reviewers can boost time to merge – pull requests with just one reviewer are often merged within an 8-hour workday, and with each additional reviewer, merging it in a day goes down by 17%. Assigning no more than three reviewers in an open source repo can be a trade-off between quality and speed.
- Build on what others have built – performance can increase up to 87% when reusing code
- The power of mentorship – when new contributors get friendly and timely reviews, and there is a commitment to mentorship, teams see a positive effect on productivity — 46% improvement in open source, and 16% in companies
- Trust and culture – teams with high trust are more likely to have a healthy collaborative culture — 2x more likely in companies, and 3x more likely in open source
- Coding is fun! The top 20 repositories by contributors are communities with topics such as gaming, manga, science, and education.
The full findings of the report are available on the Octoverse site.
