A new report from developer analysts at GitClear takes a look at the productivity of software developers. They suggest that companies may demand more from their developers in the future and – also thanks to the support of artificial intelligence (AI) – expect more from smaller team sizes.
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Now consider the analysis presented by GitClear, for their analysis of developer productivity git commit count percentage statistics Take a look at the number of commits per year as a metric. This shows that full-time developers provide an average of 673 commits per year, which equates to about 2.8 commits per day. There is also a trend that the number of commits is decreasing in connection with the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
The number of commitments made per year among at least 100 change-makers per year.
(Image: GitClear)
Relevance for developers in top organizations
Particularly experienced developers achieve at least 1000 commits per year (median: 1,563). This is relevant because, according to the study, this group occupies top positions such as senior developer or staff/senior staff engineer (“L6/L7”) in large technology companies (“Tier-1”) such as Google, Amazon or Facebook ( “Tier-2”). These numbers are therefore intended to provide guidance for those who want to pursue a career in a top company.
The analysis also shows that this developer group is active on average only on working days, rather than weekends or holidays. This shows that it is currently possible to create a healthy balance between work and private life, even in demanding positions.
Artificial intelligence reduces the number of commits
Considering the impact of artificial intelligence, the report comes to the conclusion that the number of commits is set to decline by about 9.5 percent between 2020 and 2023. The study justifies this trend, which seems paradoxical at first glance, with an increase in commit change density; developers bundle larger changes into fewer commits.
Based on its observations, the report identifies three key trends that will influence the expectations of software developers.
- Organizations will encourage their developers to deploy code changes more frequently. They believe that modern tools allow such an approach and they want to ensure transparency for management and make reviews easier thanks to smaller work units.
- Commit messages and pull request descriptions are becoming more comprehensive, particularly as a result of available AI tools that generate corresponding descriptions.
- Startups and teams will shrink in size and give priority to senior developers. The impact of AI can be felt here again: with modern language models, developers can implement even larger ideas with relatively small commitments. And increased productivity, especially among highly qualified developers, will help ensure that even small teams of five or fewer people are sufficient for product development. The report particularly highlights the 99th percentile, which implements ten times more commitments than an average developer.
Public GitHub profiles that recorded between 100 and 20,000 commits of code in at least one year between 2020 and 2024 serve as the data basis for the report on Git Commit Count Percentile Stats. Cumulatively, the report records information from 878,592 developer years. Behind the analysis is Alloy, the provider of the “engineering intelligence platform” GitClear. The results are now presented in the blog. The company became known to the wider public with its thesis about the degradation of code quality through AI.
Even the study authors express doubts about the extent to which committed count represents a viable concept for measuring productivity: “Committed count is nothing more than an idealized barometer for development progress. It is trivial to manipulate the number of transfers.”
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