News Feature | January 5, 2016

Survey Provides Developer Productivity Insights

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Survey Provides Developer Productivity Insights

Things are improving for developers and DevOps according to findings form a survey from JFrog. Based on data collected from more than 1,000 respondents during Q3 2015, the Developer and DevOps Trends 2015 Survey provides a look at the issues facing developers and how things have changed (or not changed) over the past few years. Areas JFrog investigated include how developers use multiple technologies, impacts to productivity, and causes of release delays.

Clearly, according to the data, developers and DevOps are using more development technologies in their work; with some using up to six or seven different formats concurrently. Approximately three-quarters of respondents (76 percent) stated that they used more than one development and packaging technology to complete their most recent projects. Maven/Gradle (51 percent) and Docker (36 percent) are the most common among survey respondents.

Other findings from the study include:  

  • Combining multiple technologies is getting easier. The number of developers who identified integrating multiple types of libraries and languages as the most challenging task decreased by 25 percent since 2013. In the 2015 survey, the most common challenge among survey respondents is test and integration platform configuration and maintenance (23 percent).
  • Developer productivity is increasing. For example, complaints of waiting during build and test time dropped by 14 percent since 2013 from 28 percent to 14 percent. In addition, only from 5 to 10 percent of survey respondents found tracking issues and tasks; source control management, branching, and merging; and configuration and maintenance of builds and dependencies “very time consuming.”
  • Last minute code changes remain a reality. Code changes remain the prevailing reason for release delays (46 percent); however, development teams are getting better at reacting to them and reducing their impact.  Other reasons survey respondents cited as the cause of a release delay are long-running integration tests (23 percent), problematic tooling (13 percent), and legal issues (5 percent).

Download the complete report here.