Key Takeaways
- InfoQ’s audience is largely made up of senior developers, with 79% of respondents describing themselves as such.
- Scrum is the most widely adopted team collaboration framework; Kanban is also widely used.
- In terms of the primary language used professionally by this sample group, Java still dominates, with JavaScript, SQL, C#, and HTML/CSS making up the top five.
- Continuous integration has been widely adopted amongst our readers with 62% running a CI server. We also had 45% of responders saying they have a continuous delivery pipeline.
- Only 32% of responders currently contribute to open source projects, but some 58% stated that they would like to.
At the end of 2019, we ran a survey of our readers to find out what tools, techniques, and languages they were using.
We’ve had an experienced data analyst working through the data with us, helping to clean up the data from the 1,712 responses we’ve used to compile this report. Nevertheless, we would emphasize that this is an Internet-based survey, and as always with these kinds of things, it is important to take the results with a grain of salt.
Key Findings
- InfoQ’s audience is largely made up of senior developers, with 79% of respondents describing themselves as such.
- Scrum is the most widely adopted team collaboration framework; Kanban is also widely used.
- In terms of the primary language used professionally by this sample group, Java still dominates, with JavaScript, SQL, C#, and HTML/CSS making up the top five.
- Continuous integration has been widely adopted amongst our readers with 62% running a CI server. We also had 45% of responders saying they have a continuous delivery pipeline.
- Only 32% of responders currently contribute to open source projects, but some 58% stated that they would like to.
Survey Universe and Demographics
InfoQ deliberately skews its content towards senior developers and team leads, and in this particular survey, some 79% of respondents described themselves as senior.
This is also reflected in the range of responses of how long people have worked in IT and age ranges. The majority (71%) have worked in the sector for 11 years or more, and a further high proportion (17%) for 6-10 years.
When we looked at roles, 54% of respondents were developers, 19% team leads, and 15% architects. We also had 6% in the C-suite -- CEO/CIO/CTO.
Before looking at the final graphs in this section, it is important to note that this survey was run before the current COVID-19 crisis, which already appears to have triggered a wave of redundancies across a range of industries and has, of course, resulted in the vast majority of people now working remotely.
However, at the time the survey was run, 79% of respondents worked on-premise, with the remaining 21% working remotely. 84% of responders were in full-time employment with an organization, and a further 11% were self-employed or freelance.
There was a fairly even split between different organization sizes.
Software Development Methodologies
The first question we asked was around software development methodologies. Scrum dominates, with Kanban second.
In terms of the "other" category, the next most popular was SAF (Scaled Agile Framework), which was cited by 12 responders.
We also looked at regional variations. There are some, as can be seen, but Scrum dominates all regions.
It is worth noting that the sample size is pretty small when we split by region -- this is the break-down of responses as best as we could infer it:
We specifically asked about team size. A little over half of the respondents work on teams of around 2-7 people.
Likewise, a little over half (55%) had co-located teams.
Programming Languages and Tools
We asked which programming languages readers had used professionally in the last 12 months or were planning to use in the next 12 months. The following graph shows the top 15 responses:
Below, there is quite a sharp drop-off in the percentage of responders using the language. The "planning to use" percentages imply that the languages that could see the largest growth for this year are Go, Kotlin, Python, and Typescript. This ties in with our most recent web development trend report in which we graduated TypeScript to Late Majority status, noting that it is "by far the most widely adopted JavaScript variant, has made substantial progress over the past few years, and a majority of JavaScript frameworks now leverage its tooling and infrastructure."
In terms of the primary language used professionally by this sample group, Java still dominates, with JavaScript, SQL, C# and HTML/CSS making up the top five.
Windows is the leading operating system for development environments used by 61% of responders. Linux is close behind at 56%.
Regarding the operating systems question, there is some variation by region: macOS, for example, has wider adoption in North America than elsewhere. You can also see from the percentages that there is a significant overlap with many responders using more than one OS.
Continuous integration has been widely adopted amongst our readers with 62% running a CI server. We also had 45% of responders saying they have a continuous delivery pipeline.
Again, there are some interesting regional variations in responses to this question. For example, Europe has the most CI Server users, and Northern America has the highest number of CD pipelines.
Types of Applications
75% of responders said they developed web back-end applications, with 54% web front-end developers. Many responders are clearly interested in machine learning applications, with 20% working on an ML-based side project, as well as many working on IoT projects and games. In general, the number of developers choosing to work on side projects does imply that many of our responders love their craft and enjoy working with software away from their day jobs.
Among those responders working on mobile applications, Android is the dominant OS with 56% of responders citing it.
React Native is the most popular choice for cross-platform development, followed by Flutter, though the majority of responders aren’t using a cross-platform framework of any kind.
32% of responders currently contribute to open source projects in some form, but 58% stated that they would like to. Only 9% of responders said they had no interest in doing so.
Testing
81% of responders said they had unit tests as part of their projects. 22% of responders test in production. Shockingly, some 7% of responders say they do no testing at all.
In the "other" category, performance and load testing were mentioned 15 times, and 2 responders mentioned that they have a separate Q&A department that does more extensive testing.
Pleasingly, we asked readers to rate InfoQ’s content—82% rated us good or exceptional.
About the Author
Charles Humble took over as editor-in-chief at InfoQ.com in March 2014, guiding our content creation including news, articles, books, video presentations and interviews. Prior to taking on the full-time role at InfoQ, Charles led our Java coverage, and was CTO for PRPi Consulting, a renumeration research firm that was acquired by PwC in July 2012. For PRPi he had overall responsibility for the development of all the custom software used within the company. He has worked in enterprise software for around 20 years as a developer, architect and development manager. In his spare time he writes music as 1/3 of London-based ambient techno group Twofish, whose debut album came out in February 2014 after 14 years of messing about with expensive toys, and spends as much time as he can with his wife and young family.