GitHub Guides

How to increasedeveloperproductivity

W R I T T EN BY G I T H U B W I T HContents
3Preface

4

Enable collaboration the DevOps way

5Take advantage of code reuse

6

Make the most of automation

7

Concentrate on documentation

8	
Keep developers happy

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Preface
In a 2022 survey, we interviewed more than 1,600 developers, security leads, and executive
decision makers across organizations large and small. Despite differing responsibilities andcompany sizes, their number one goal was the same: developer productivity.¹
But how can you really measure productivity? Certainly it’s more than the number of pull
requests or lines of code.
“Developer productivity has been studied extensively. Unfortunately, after decades ofresearch and practical development experience, knowing how to measure productivity oreven define developer productivity has remained elusive,” according to the Association forComputing Machinery.¹

After poring over case studies and speaking to experts, here’s
something we do know: The enemy of productivity in all its forms
is fragmentation.
When we discuss fragmentation at GitHub, we’re generally talking about the damageorganizations can cause by overloading their engineering teams with tools, like extra
security plug-ins and administrative management tools that run separately. While thegoal might be to keep up with the ever-changing tech landscape, having large amounts ofdisparate tools does the opposite: slowing down developers and causing frustration while
they switch between tabs, open new programs, and push through red tape with each newtool.
But fragmentation stems from more than just the pain of context switching among tools.
It also comes from remote workers who don’t have the means to collaborate effectively
and siloed knowledge due to fast hires and attrition. All of this leads to a poor developer
experience—a challenge that reverberates throughout the business, negatively impacting
goals and your ROI. When your teams can’t get their work done efficiently, productivity
plummets.
From enabling better collaboration to adopting code reuse and automation, these tips will
help you unblock developers—empowering them to get more work done and enjoy theprocess.

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Enable collaboration
the DevOps way
In a Stack Overflow survey of 73,000 software developersfrom more than 180 countries, 85% of developers saytheir organizations are at least partially remote.³ While thismeans that businesses can find the very best developers
for their teams no matter their time zone, it also means that
effective collaboration isn’t a given, and needs to be built
into the developer workflow.
And distance isn’t the only barrier to collaboration. Even
if they are in the same office, today’s organizations haveteams working with different programming languages,tools, and frameworks.

73,000Software developers
surveyed from more than180 countries.

85%of developers say theirorganizations are at least
partially remote.

“If a developer within one team wants to collaborate with otherparts of the organization, they would need to ramp up fast on the
programming language or framework being used within that team,which they might not be familiar with. Not to mention, getting all ofthe needed dependencies and tooling set up on their machine.”
Dhanashri Chavan // Senior Enterprise Advocate, GitHub

Developers spend a lot of time and energy in order to simply work together, which canimpact business timelines and goals.
That’s why we recommend implementing DevOps, a set of standards that minimizes thosesilos, turning the linear approach of building, testing, and shipping into a more collaborative
effort. With shared tools, responsibilities, and knowledge, teams can communicate better
about timelines, goals, and expectations.⁶ Thanks to GitHub, teams have a centralized
platform to do it all, where tools are easily integrated and easy to scale, no matter how large
your organization is.
Let’s take a look at Telus, a communications and information technology provider in
Canada. They have a team of over 78,000 people and close to 5,000 developers across theworld. Before switching over to GitHub Enterprise and adopting DevOps, they struggled witheverything from managing dependencies to accessing shared packages.

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Ta k e a dva ntage o f c o d e reu s e

C O N T.

“With GitHub, we now have a single platform for developer
communication throughout Telus,” says Director of Engineeringand Productivity, Justin Watts. “Developers can propose anddiscuss ideas through issues and pull requests, which has reallydemocratized technical conversation.”
Among Telus’ favorite features is GitHub Codespaces, which allows them to create aninstant, standardized developer environment for distributed teams of developers, businessanalysts, and technicians to better develop and collaborate on code—no matter the typeof device they are using. “It’s so much easier for developers to use or even contribute to
any repo when they can just spin-up a Codespace and immediately start working with thecode,” explains Katie Peters, a Telus Developer Advocate. “It’s a huge win for innersource
collaboration.”

Take advantage of code reuse
In GitHub’s 2021 State of the Octoverse report, we learned that frictionless code reuse
makes developers more efficient and productive. In fact, developers’ performance at work
can increase by up to 87% when code reuse is easy and doesn’t introduce friction.²“Open source communities have solved remote, distributed collaboration at scale,” says
Chris Reddington, an Enterprise Advocate here at GitHub. “By defaulting to open source
principles and empowering anyone to contribute through clear documentation (READMEsand Contributor guides), we can lower barriers and foster a cross-team collaborative cultureinternally via pull requests.”

That's just what happened at 3M, where disparate teams, knowledge silos, and code
scattered across repositories made productivity (and progress) a challenge. After moving
over to GitHub Enterprise, their team adopted Innersource—secure code reuse behind
their firewall with all the best practices of open source. “Code sharing is fairly large at 3M,”
explains 3M Cloud and Security Architect Paul Pottorff. “We have gone from nothing toalmost 3,000 innersource repos.”

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M a k e the m o s t o f auto m ati o nC O N T.

Those innersource repos on GitHub make all the difference for 3M’s developers. “WithGitHub, we can collaborate better across our various environments,” says Tina Beamer,
3M’s IT Manager of Operations and Quality. “You don’t have to go out to a separate project
management tool. You don’t have to go to a spreadsheet, or a Microsoft project, or into Jira.
It’s all on GitHub. It’s made us more productive.”

Make the most of automation
From our 2021 State of the Octoverse report, we also learned that good automation helps
teams communicate better and more clearly, and it helps them go faster at scale.² Chris
Reddington adds, “If we can automate our builds, tests and other checks (e.g. static codeanalysis) earlier in the development lifecycle (before our code is merged into production),then we can be sure that we’re building quality software.”That’s where GitHub Actions can be valuable. More than 130 million CI jobs are run every
month on GitHub Actions—these jobs can help teams ship software faster, doubling thenumber of pull requests per day and decreasing the time to merge by 33%.²
When Procter & Gamble began using GitHub Actions to build automation, their teams wereable to work much more efficiently, getting new developers up to speed faster and enabling
their developers to reduce manual tasks and focus on innovating.

“GitHub is an accelerator. It reduces the amount of time it takes for
us to bring value to our customers and consumers.”
Danilo Suntal // DevOps Lead, Procter & Gamble

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C o n c entr ate o n d o c umentati o n

C O N T.

Concentrate on documentation
Documentation may not be the sexiest topic, but better documentation is a huge key
to developer productivity. In fact, developers see about a 50% productivity boost when
documentation is up-to-date, detailed, and available in different formats.²“Think of any occasion where you’re learning something new,” says Chris Reddington.
“Where do you start? Probably with a getting started document, or some form ofinstructions, or reference manual. This is no different in software development! Whether
we’re looking to find out about the project at a glance (typically in a README.md) file,
how to contribute into a project (typically a CONTRIBUTING.md file), or some deeper
technical details (usually part of a set of documentation for our codebase). Concentratingon documentation is vital. After all, what good is writing software if people don’t understandhow to use it?”And documentation isn’t just about making onboarding more efficient. It’s about ensuringthat developers don’t waste time searching for solutions.

“For a team of 50 developers, the amount of time spent searchingfor answers and solutions add up to between 333 and 651 hours oflost time per week across the entire team.”// Stack Overflow Survey³

Those knowledge silos cause massive interruptions to their workflow and those hours add
up. Think of what developers could do with all of that time back.
In fact, having good documentation literally pays off through stronger technical capabilities
and higher software delivery and operational performance.⁴

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Keep d e v elo p er s h a p p yC O N T.

Keep developers happy
All four of these tips contribute to the final one: Keep developers happy.
Ensure devs aren’t bogged down in manual tasks, reduce friction by allowing them to use
tools they know and love, and enable better collaboration. Create trust and transparency.
Let them focus on doing their best work. Why? Because happy developers mean a more
successful business. It’s truly as simple as that.
Teams do their best work when they’re personally invested in the outcome.⁶

Sources:¹ Emerald Research Group & GitHub quantitative survey, n=1693, 2022
² The State of the Octoverse | The State of the Octoverse explores a year of change with new deep dives into writingcode faster, creating documentation and how we build sustainable communities on GitHub. Accessed September 20,
2022. https://octoverse.github.com/2021.
³ Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022.” n.d. Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey. Accessed September 20,
2022. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#overview.
⁴ State of DevOps 2021 - Accelerate.” n.d. Google. Accessed September 20, 2022. https://services.google.com/fh/files/
misc/state-of-devops-2021.pdf.
⁵ University of Victoria, Microsoft Research, and GitHub. 2021. “The SPACE of Developer Productivity.” ACM Queue.
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3454124.
⁶ What is DevOps? DevOps, CI/CD and DevSecOps Defined.” n.d. GitHub Resources. Accessed September 20, 2022.
https://resources.github.com/devops/.

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