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GitLab Survey Highlights Some Trends among Developers

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GitLab has released the outcomes of a survey they conducted among software professionals from 362 startups from July 6 through July 27. Main highlights are developers' preference for using latest tools and more collaboration; security is high-priority, but 81 percent admitted to releasing software before it’s ready.

According to a vast majority of surveyed developers, access to the latest development tools is a top priority, including tools for distributed version control, continuous integration, chat and collaboration, agile development, and continuous delivery. Not surprisingly, 92 percent of surveyed developers use Git, which provides improved collaboration according to 59 percent, while 40 percent of respondents revealed that Git’s learning curve was their biggest concern.

GitLab’s survey also confirms the importance of open source tools in developers' every day life, with 56 percent of them stating that more than half of their development tools are open source, and 18 percent using exclusively open source tools. As for languages, 51 percent of respondents use JavaScript as their preferred language, followed by Python (36 percent), PHP (30 percent) and Java (26 percent). Interestingly, Swift adoption, at 8 percent, has already doubled Objective-C’s (4 percent) among respondents.

The survey also shows a large interest in security, with 86 percent of developers saying that security is important or extremely important. However, as a matter of fact, 81 percent of developers admit to releasing code before it is ready due to a number of requirements, including schedule or senior management pressure, and team turnover. An interesting insight concerns innersourcing, i.e., the adoption of the open source development paradigm within an organization, which 39 percent found a useful practice to uncover security bugs, save time, and improve team dynamics.

Finally, 33 percent of developers stated they preferred a hybrid development process, with 26 percent using Scrum, 18 percent using Agile, and only 2 percent using Waterfall.

The complete 2016 Global Developer Report can be found on GitLab site.

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