1,600 Developers Speak, and They Want Better Integration

January 19, 2011
By Charles Gold

3 minute read time

The results are in, and we're taking note of some interesting trends. If you participated in the survey, or if you're just interested in this snapshot of the development infrastructure landscape, take a look at the results of our survey, or read some of the highlights in the following post.

• There is broad support for Maven with a clear majority of you (90%) either using Maven or are planning to use Maven.

• 83% of you use a continuous integration server, and within that majority 72% of you use Hudson. Hudson is the clear winner among continuous integration servers.

• Even though continuous integration adoption is widespread, about 70% of survey respondents report that "Not Knowing a Build Has Broken, or Why" is a problem that affects productivity.

• Most of the respondents are developers and architects, with only 6% of the respondents calling themselves "Build Engineers."

• Excluding managers and team leads from the stats, roughly 76% of you are technical, hands-on users of Maven, Nexus, and our other products.

• One quarter of you work for organizations with more than 500 developers, and a little more than a third work for companies with between 1 and 25 developers. (This suggests that Maven can be used in both environments: to support small nimble project teams and to support the largest, internet-scale engineering efforts out there).

• Open source infrastructure has become the standard for approximately 50% of survey participants. A large majority of you report no obstacles to the adoption of open source infrastructure in the enterprise.

• Most of you report a developer onboarding experience that eats up at least 1-2 days of productive time.

• The biggest complaint from survey participants? "Lack of Integration Between Components." Well over 65% of you marked "Lack of Integration Between Components" or "Not Well Integrated with Eclipse" as the biggest complaint.

• Survey respondents spanned the globe, with noticeable clusters in Europe, North America, China, and India. For a map, check out the survey results.

• The process for finding artifacts and dependencies is very ad-hoc, 58% of you search the web or rely on word of mouth to decide which artifacts to reference in Maven Central. Only 25% of you report searching Central to find new dependencies and artifacts.

• About 87% of you report that there is no mechanism for controlling which artifacts are used in your projects. With only 13% of you working in environments that have a completely "locked down" environment when it comes to project dependencies.

• 75% of respondents would like to get more information about project stability and maturity from Maven Central. 55% of respondents want licensing information from Central.

• 80% of respondents would find immediate notification of changes in artifacts beneficial, with most respondents reporting that they learn of new projects either by word of mouth or from the web.

For those of you marking "lack of integration" as your biggest complaint for development infrastructure - we're listening. We've invested heavily in Eclipse development, moving m2e into the Eclipse Indigo release train, and we're taking the time to make sure that the foundations of Hudson can support clean Maven integration.

Integration was the primary design goal for our new infrastructure suite, Sonatype professional (now known as the Sonatype Platform).

Written by Charles Gold
Charles is the former CMO at Sonatype. He is now the EVP of Strategy and CMO at Atomicorp. His experience spans product marketing; product management; brand & category strategy; multi-channel digital marketing; ABM; field marketing; PR & analyst relations; martech; and full-funnel analytics.