Glossary

Developers

Developers are individual accounts on GitHub, regardless of their activity.

Location

Country information for developers is based on their last location, where known. For organizations, we take the best-known location information either from the organization profile, or the most-common country organization members are active in. We only use location information in aggregate to look at things like trends in growth in a particular country or region. We don’t look at location information granularity finer than country level.

Open source projects

Open source projects are public repositories with an open source license.

Open source at work

“Open source at work” projects are repositories with an open source license owned by a paid Organization.

Work projects

Work projects are private repositories owned by a paid Organization.

Productivity

Productivity is self-reported and measured through survey questions based on the SPACE framework, and other research on factors that influence and predict developer productivity.

Performance

Performance is self-reported and measured through the survey questions used in the DORA DevOps Quick Check.

Organizations

Organization accounts represent collections of people on GitHub. These can be paid or free, big or small, businesses or nonprofits.

Projects and repositories

We use projects and repositories interchangeably, although we understand that sometimes a larger project can span many repositories.

Team

We use the term “team” to refer to any group of more than two people that work together on a project, although we understand that sometimes teams can be much larger and more formal. This allowed us to allow for any kind of arrangement where people work together, whether in open source or at work, and think about the many ways that people collaborate to develop and deliver software.