The development profession is full of new developers. Over 50% of respondents indicated that they have been coding for less than 10 years and more than 35% have been coding for less than five years.  

Coders are also starting out younger. The most popular age range for a person to write their first line of code was 11 to 17, with 53% of responses. Fourteen percent of respondents wrote their first line of code between the ages of 5 and 10, and 24% wrote their first line between 18 and 24 years old.  

The survey also indicated that the pandemic has influenced work status for many developers, and a greater percentage of respondents now work part-time or are in school. The percentage of full-time developers has decreased in the past year. 

“This may reflect the effects of the pandemic, which saw workers from all industries stepping back and reevaluating their relationship to a five day work week and in-person employment,” Stack Overflow wrote in a blog post explaining the results of the report. 

JavaScript remained the most commonly used programming language for the ninth year in a row. This year Python surpassed SQL to become the third most popular language. 

React surpassed jQuery as the most commonly used web framework, with 40% of developers using it. JQuery was used by 34%, Express by 23%, Angular by 22%, Vue.js by 18%, and ASP.NET Core by 18%. 

AWS was the dominant platform among Stack Overflow users, with 54% of respondents using it. Following AWS was Google Cloud Platform at 31.05% and Microsoft Azure at 30.77% — nearly tied.

Other popular tools developers used include Git (used by 93%), Docker (48%), Yarn (17%), and Kubernetes (16%).  

Stack Overflow surveyed over 80,000 respondents for the survey. More information is available here. 

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The survey of 450 Java developers also found that Spring users spend 25% of their time on tests, while non-Spring users spend 20% of their time on tests.

Mathew Lodge, CEO of AI-powered automated test solution provider DiffBlue, which sponsored the survey, said the results are an example of how tooling can help organizations adopt a certain way of working. “Everyone talks about cultural change, and the culture of testing, and good tooling helps people do the right things,” he said. “Spring has really great support for unit testing and testing in general.”

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Lodge noted that respondents said the primary benefit of Spring/Spring Boot is that it saves them time, but the second most important benefit to them is that the framework makes it easier for developers to write unit tests in the first place. 

But, paradoxically, even spending that much time writing and maintaining tests, 45% of the survey respondents say they have less than 50% test coverage of their code; 37% said their coverage falls between 26% and 50%; while another 6% said they have complete code coverage. Of that last 6%, all are Spring users. “That just highlights how difficult it is to do unit testing,” Lodge said.

Some in the industry argue that 100% code coverage isn’t necessary; rather, organizations should focus on the areas that have the greatest impact on the user and on security. But Lodge said, “The danger is you don’t really know what you don’t know in that situation.”

He went on to say, “We try and write the smallest number of tests possible to get the maximum coverage, because you want to have as few tests as possible, so they’re easier to understand. And, you don’t get … 100 tests failing when you change one thing.”

Hand in hand with that, developers were asked to describe their organization’s code in the following terms that apply — reliable, maintainable, testable, portable, automated and modern. Most (51%) respondents described their code as reliable; 50% chose modern and 40% chose maintainable. And, despite respondents indicating they spend a quarter of their time on testing, only 37% described their code as testable. Spring users were most likely to describe their code as maintainable.

The survey report noted that DiffBlue Cover was described by 39% of respondents as “very useful,” trailing only JUnit (44%) and TestNG (40%). Parasoft’s JTest was fourth at 38%.

The survey, though, did not answer this question: Does Spring help developers be better testers, or do better testers use Spring? Spring/Spring Boot developers, according to the survey report, tend to value unit testing more highly than non-Spring users; tend to have higher quality and more maintainable code, and have better code coverage in their organizations.

Read the complete survey here.

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“Continued bad press and negative business impact from data breaches and privacy issues are top of mind these days for consumers and corporations,” said Shawn Rogers, senior director of global engagement, digital content and analytic strategy at TIBCO. “The volume and velocity of security-centric data need technologies like AI / ML to help identify issues early and automatically as the “data gravity” with this sort of information is too heavy to analyze without it.”

While about 28 percent of respondents are using AI and ML for sophisticated data security, around 24 percent are using technology to implement real-time analytics to identify fraud, pricing and product offers. Another 24 percent are using AI and ML for personalized data visualizations and dashboards. Other use cases include sales and revenue forecasting and personal security.

“People, data, and technology form the nucleus of innovation and executives across all industries need all three working together for success,”  said Rogers.

In another study from TIBCO, the company found experts are deploying AI and ML at a far greater rate than beginners to boost innovation. While 46.2 percent of experts responded to using AI and ML solutions, only 14.2 percent of digital beginners said they did.

“This adoption of advanced solutions enables digital transformation leaders to create a wide variety of use cases. Digital beginners struggle to leverage this advanced technology, creating a competitive gap. AI and ML have expanded the use cases companies can utilize,” TIBCO stated in its findings.

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The survey included responses from 1,250 developers, 65 percent of whom consider themselves professional developers, from all over the world.

According to the survey, about half of the developers ranked adding or incorporating a new language as difficult to very difficult. More than 61 percent said they spend four hours or less per day on programming and 65 percent said they don’t contribute or maintain open source projects. About half of those developers blamed a lack of time.

The survey also found that open source languages get varying degrees of satisfaction with Python being most satisfying and SQL being the most popular for daily use. 80 percent of respondents use SQL the most, followed by Javascript at 77 percent and Python at 72 percent.

“Open source languages drive innovation, but developers struggle with managing dependencies and adding new languages securely and efficiently,” said Bart Copeland, the CEO and president of ActiveState.

When it comes to security, 41 percent experienced some or a lot of problems ensuring security is up-to-date with the latest or most secure version of every package. Similarly, 40 percent experienced some or a lot of problems building new, stable releases that behave the same as old releases.

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“Hiring and retaining skilled developers is critical for businesses everywhere. Recruiters and hiring managers need a deep understanding of who developers are, what they care about and what they want from their employers. For example, nearly half of developers view values misalignment as a deal-breaker when considering a job opportunity,” said Vivek Ravisankar, co-founder and CEO of HackerRank. “We want to match every developer to the right job, and this data gives engineering teams a blueprint to find and keep the best developers for their roles.”

The report is based on the responses of more than 71,000 software developers from more than 100 countries.

As far as what makes employees optimistic about a position, professional growth and learning was key for about 65 percent of developers, and work-life balance for about 46 percent. But in addition to a lack of clarity, 49 percent of developers said a lack of aligned values and 14 percent of developers said a lack of diversity both increased unhappiness with a position or workplace.

The issue of diversity is hardly helped, the survey found, by the United States’ recent tighter immigration policies. HackerRank explained that a third of hiring managers reported U.S. immigration policies as a detriment to their ability to find suitable talent. These same policies, the report found, are discouraging to developers outside of the United States, with 27 percent of them responding that they or someone they know have been put off by the tighter restrictions.

But developers concerned with their workplaces were very likely to raise those concerns, with 38 percent of respondents saying that they spoke up. The following 23 percent just up and quit their positions.

The number one concern once a developer has been hired and begun working, the survey found, was messy code, with 65 percent of respondents ranking it at the top, followed by poorly written documentation, ranked at the top spot by 57 percent of respondents.

The survey also looked at the programming languages being used by developers, and found JavaScript was the most used programming language of 2018, surpassing last years’ most-used language, Java, with over 60 percent of respondents saying that they knew JavaScript. In addition, the report found that React will likely overtake AngularJS as the most popular JavaScript framework in 2019, with a jump in knowledge from 20 percent to 26 percent of respondents.

Other technologies that are on the rise include IoT, with 53 percent of respondents predicting it will be adopted most in the near future, and deep learning following closely behind at 50 percent. On the other hand cryptocurrency and blockchain was considered “unpredictable” by respondents, with around 20 percent of the developers calling the technology’s growth over the next two years “overhyped.”

The survey also noted a generational divide marked by what sorts of projects developers considered their first programming project, as well as what sorts of music they listen to while coding. For millennial and Gen Z respondents, calculators and simple websites gave them their start (while they bopped to electronic music and hip-hop according to the survey), while a majority of Gen X and Baby Boomer respondents started with a game (while enjoying electronic and classical music, and classical and rock music, respectively).

The full report is available here.

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This year’s survey was the first to be offered in languages other than English, increasing the number of respondents to 5,991. Seventy-five percent of those respondents identified as users of Rust, an increase from last year’s 66.9 percent.

“Looking closer at these users who feel unproductive in Rust, only about 25 percent are in their first month of use,” the report stated. “The challenge here is to find ways to help bridge users to productivity so they don’t get stuck.”

Investment in and the size of Rust-based projects has also grown, the company found, with “medium to large investments” of 10,000 to 100,000 lines of code now accounting for 23 percent of projects versus last year’s 16 percent.

Overall, Rust use in the workplace has grown, with 8.9 percent of respondents using Rust full-time, up from last year’s 4.4 percent, and 21.2 percent using the language part-time, up from 16.6 percent last year.

“There is more room for Rust to grow into more companies, over a third of which users report aren’t currently looking into evaluating Rust in the coming year,” the company reported. “When paired with the survey data that said that nearly half of non-users needed the company support, this shows the need for further company outreach or more company-focused information about Rust.”

The team also found that creating a welcoming, accessible community for new and veteran users is a priority. “New users should feel encouraged to explore, share ideas, and generally be themselves,” the team wrote.

This is reflected in the list of challenges the company says it needs to tackle based on the survey results:

1. The need for better library support
2. A more improved IDE experience
3. The need for broader adoption of Rust generally
4. A richer ecosystem of tools and support
5. An improved learning curve
6. The need for important language features and crates to be stable and supported
7. Support for async programming
8. Support for GUI development
9. Better documentation
10. Improved compile times

“Rust continues to grow steadily, and with it, both its strengths and challenges are introduced to a broader audience,” the team wrote.

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Additionally, developers say they are either too intimidated to contribute, lack the resources, or do not get enough time to contribute from their company.

DigitalOcean’s CURRENTS A Seasonal Report on Developer Trends in the Cloud: Open Source Edition is based off of more than 4,300 international developers, and focuses specifically on how companies are using open source and why they support the community.

The report found 55 percent of developers contribute to open-source software while 75 percent are expecting to use open-source software as part of day-to-day operations.

Developers’ reasons for engaging with and contributing to the open-source community were varied. DigitalOcean found 69 percent of respondents said that learning and becoming a better coder was number one. This was followed by being part of a community and keeping abreast of new technologies, among others. The motivators to get a developer to contribute to the open-source community were improving skills, an easier entry point, more time from their company and more resources.

Most of the developers that reported being involved with open source say that they’re using JavaScript, which is reflected in the report’s finding that the most exciting open-source project among the surveyed was React.js, with Kubernetes not far behind.

The top project for discovering open-source projects to contribute to was by far GitHub with 97 percent of respondents reporting they use it, followed by GitLab, BitBucket and SourceForge.

When looking at open-source software within businesses, the report found only 18 percent of companies are involved in an open-source organization like the Apache Software Foundation, Node.js Foundation, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Seventy-five percent of respondents reported that their company donates less than $1,000 annually to open source.

“While more than half of developers are contributing to open source, their companies are not as supportive of the community’s organizations,” the report started. However, “even though most companies don’t invest in open source organizations, they encourage the use of open source within their businesses: nearly three out of every four respondents said their companies expect them to use open source software as part of their day-to-day development work.”

Businesses have to consider if the technology is widely adopted, documentation, active maintainers, and if it would be faster than doing it themselves when considering an open-source project, according to the report. Other factors included functionality, security, cost, accessibility and compatibility.

When polled about which major companies respondents think are most supportive of the open-source community, Google garnered 53 percent of the vote, with Microsoft coming in second at 23 percent. Facebook, Amazon and Apple trailed.

“While open source advocates would undoubtedly like to see more developers contributing to the community, the good news is developers as a whole are very bullish: 89 percent said the open source community is healthy and growing,” report started.

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The survey of 1,407 respondents from 92 countries, made up of 44 percent self-reported developer/programmers among other IT professionals, found that 75 percent of them spend at least part of their typical week managing dependencies and development tools and 71 percent encounter issues when building libraries and packages at least part of the time.

“To manage open source code development, many enterprises use homegrown build systems, manual processes or legacy versions of languages that need to be manually updated,” Brian Copeland, CEO of ActiveState, said in a release.

Among the bigger challenges developers say they face in coordinating tools are incorporating new languages and dependencies, with only 9 percent and 17 percent respectively reporting that it was “Not Difficult.” Additionally, 67 percent of respondents said that they’ve skipped out on incorporating better or more suitable technology due to the difficulty.

The surveyed developers also stated that stability and security were their biggest concerns over incorporating new technologies, with handling threats and dependencies with open-source language distribution also causing issues or problems.

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These practices are:

1. An emphasis on testing, with proper spending and steady progress in upgrading testing capabilities
2. Implementation of continuous testing to supplement and uphold a continuous delivery system
3. The inclusion of testing staff in integrated delivery teams
4. Automation of end-to-end functional testing
5. A shift left to start testing earlier in the development cycle

“For firms that follow these five best practices, testing is a way to gain speed and efficiency, rather than a bottleneck to delivering faster,” the company wrote in the report.

The survey looked at responses from 603 enterprise Agile and/or DevOps specialists from all over the world and focused on evaluating where companies’ priorities lie in the development cycle and by what metrics they measure Agile and DevOps success.

Also among the core results of the survey, Forrester found that automation can cripple user experience when not enough emphasis is placed on measuring software quality in the first place.

“Firms must understand the business risk — the chance of a negative user experience — that each software application carries when deciding whether to release,” the company wrote. “Unfortunately, most firms today admit they have gaps in their ability to accurately assess and manage business risk in testing.”

The last highlighted result of the report noted that the most effective DevOps leaders “ruthlessly” push for end-to-end test automation.

“With a better indication of risk from their testing metrics, DevOps leaders can relentlessly pursue automation to develop with quality at speed,” the company wrote. “They do this by prioritizing end-to-end automated business process test cases. They automate test design and test execution, and they orchestrate the automation of the overall dev-test-deploy process.”

The full report is available here.

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The June 2018 “Currents” report on trends among cloud developers also found rapid acceleration in container adoption; growth opportunities and salary rank as most important among developers in what they want from their jobs; and coding bootcamp participants feel more prepared than college graduates..

This was DigitalOcean’s fourth annual report, which surveyed 5,000 industry professionals around the world.

According to the report, 49 percent of developers reported that they are currently using containers. Though adoption is slightly lower among companies that reported only 1-5 employees at 35 percent, usage is fairly consistent across the industry, the report states. Users reported simplified and faster testing, avoiding vendor lock-in and being able to scale as the top benefits for containers.

Among that same group of companies that reported 1-5 employees, Docker Swarm beats out Kubernetes as the most-used container orchestration platform, DigitalOcean found, but Kubernetes dominates with a 42 percent share. In addition, 52 percent of container users reported they have yet to implement a container management platform, according to the company.

The biggest split in the survey’s findings came down to professionals’ understanding of serverless computing, with 50 percent reporting a strong understanding of the technology and the other 50 percent reporting insufficient understanding. Only 33 percent of respondents reported having deployed an application to a serverless environment in the past year, with AWS Lambda hosting 58 percent of those deployments.

Serverless computing also saw an age-related split among respondents, with the youngest users form the ages 18-24 reporting their biggest challenge is dependence on a third-party provider. The oldest bracket, aged 55-64, reported the complexity of migrating as their biggest concern. But overall, respondents found monitoring and debugging were the number one challenge of serverless deployments.

When looking at jobs, the survey found equal importance placed on a competitive salary and opportunities for internal growth and development for developers looking for a position, with both categories being selected by 39 percent of respondents. A workplace culture in line with developers’ personalities followed closely with 38 percent reporting it a top consideration.

Though voted equally important when looking for a new position, lack of growth and development opportunities placed as the top reason for engineers leaving positions, with salary concerns, poor leadership and outdated technologies following behind.

Finally, this year’s survey took a look at industry-wide feelings about coding bootcamps. Only six percent of respondents reported coming from a coding bootcamp alone, with 51 percent reporting a traditional college background and nine percent reporting both. Surprisingly, the survey found that developers coming out of coding bootcamps are generally more confident in their preparedness for a software engineering position, with 61 percent feeling adequately prepared compared to only 41 percent of college graduates. This in spite of just under half of bootcamp graduates reporting that they’ve felt at a disadvantage because of their background during interviews and only 53 percent of hiring managers worldwide feeling positively about coding bootcamps. When broken down between the U.S., Canada, U.K. and India, India is significantly more receptive towards bootcamps, with 67 percent reporting positive feelings towards them.

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