The State of Developer Ecosystem 2021 by JetBrains
JetBrains just released the State of Developer Ecosystem 2021 report, a survey conducted every year to highlight trends in the industry regarding programming languages, tools, frameworks, teams organization, etc. This year 31,743 developers from 183 countries were involved in this survey to produce an overview of the global developer’s community. In this post, we point out some interesting facts we picked from this report by JetBrains.
Programming Languages and Frameworks
JavaScript is the most popular language, as 69 % of the respondents used it in the past 12 months. The highest adoptions plans or migrations projects target Go (11%), TypeScript, and Kotlin (9 %). Only Rust has higher adoption plan (7%) than current usage (6%). 14% of JavaScript users plan to migrate to TypeScript in the next 12 months, while 14% of Python users intend to migrate to Go.
Compared with 2017, the most significant usage increase concerns Python (32% to 52%) and TypeScript (12% to 29%).
The JetBrains’ report also provides data regarding regions. We learn that in France, PHP is the most popular language (43%). In India, this is Python (44%), and in South Korea, this is Java (53 %).
In terms of frameworks, let’s take a quick focus :
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JS: React (49%) and Vue (43%) are favored by developers, while Angular (18%) is a little bit behind.
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PHP: Laravel appears to be the most popular framework (64%) compared to Symfony (24 %).
Developers and organization
It’s interesting to notice that in terms of gender diversity in the tech industry, this is increasing among younger developers rather than the more experienced generations, as shows this extract from the report :
55% of the respondents say that their team’s size is between 2 and 7 people, while 18% state their size is between 8 and 12 developers.
36% use Scrum and 16% Kanban, while 14% claim using a combined version of those 2 Agile frameworks.
In terms of education, online learning systems such as Udemy (66%) or Coursera (46%) are commonly solicited by developer. This shows that continuous learning is a key aspect in the Tech industry and for developers careers.
Tools
In terms of Version Control Services, in companies, GitHub is the most used platform (48%), then come GitLab (36%), BitBucket (21%), and Azure DevOps (7%). The remaining 16% use other tools or custom tools. Git is regularly used by 93% of the respondents, and in the 2nd position, SVN is used by 7%, which is a significant gap.
84% state that pull/merge requests are used in their company, confirming that code review gets standardized in the industry.
Knowledge sharing is ensured by Confluence (34%), Google Docs (23%), or Gitlab (15%), which has a Wiki feature. On that topic, our solution Promyze is designed for collaborative best coding practices definition and sharing, less general-purpose than the above solutions.
38 % of developers use static analysis during development, which is a similar trend compared to last year.
MySQL (61%) and PostgreSQL (36%) are the most used systems in terms of databases. Redis (29%) and MongoDB(28%) are the first and second NoSQL systems in the ranking.
Testing
The JetBrains’ report provides unit-testing frameworks insights per language. It’s interesting to notice that 42% of the JS users don’t use unit tests, while Jest (39%) or Mocha (15%) are the most popular frameworks in this category. Inversely, JUnit is used by 85% of Java users.
To the question “What types of tests do you have in your projects ?” this is what has been answered :
This is a typical representation of the Test Pyramid.
BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) is used by 12% of the respondents, highlighting that this framework is still to be adopted by Tech companies. The 2020 report don’t provide such data so we can’t get a comparison.
Also, 13% of respondents claim they work with external partners from assessors and outsourced contractors for product testing.
Such survey is produced every year and provides insightful data about the Tech industry. Can’t wait to be next year to check the future trends. In particular, the work conditions and remote situations of developers after the COVID context.
The State of Development EcoSystem 2021 – JetBrains