Which tools do software engineers use for backend development, frontend, infrastructure, AI tooling, and more, today? Reader survey, with feedback and analysis, based on 3,000+ responses
Quote: But I wonder if the root problem is really with JIRA itself, or whether any project management tool idolised by managers would encounter the same pushback? It is rare to find a dev who loves creating and updating tickets, and writing documentation.
I think we can dig deeper a bit. I do believe that Kanban principles, which are at the foundation of all modern project management tools, are not compatible with software development. Kanban is good for an automobile factory conveyor belt; it's transactional in its nature, whereas software development is not transactional, because code lines are compounding on top of each other. It's like a building a skyscraper, and not assembling something from ready parts. Software development is much more creative than that.
Linear is #4 on the most loved tools here. Its better than Jira in almost every way. Jira is just very sticky, and the decision makers on when it's used are not the ones using it most.
Surprised to see so many Ruby devs, not that far from Java. Can it be that someone from Shopify shared the survey internally and 350 engineers working there took it?😅
It will be interesting to know what type of local development environment including operating system is popular these days. How popular are remote coding environments? Are people still using remote VM for development? Some additional things - debugger, observability stack etc.
Thanks, Himadri! We didn’t ask about these topics, but I’m making a note for next time. Would have been nice to get details on eg cloud-based dev environments that were a hot topic in 2021-22… and then I’be just not sensed much excitement since? Or maybe AI tools took over the focus.
We will have o11y tools in part 2. Debuggers: not this time. Making another note :)
I promise, not on purpose! Most graphs are like this, but I now CANNOT unsee it! Especially with a few gray hairs starting to appear on me as well, hah!
My company won't consider AI tools that don't have this functionality due to liability concerns, which certainly limits the pool of available tools to pick from.
One quick note on Bitrise, it doesn't do CI/CD just for native ios/android, it does for all e.g. we have it set up for an Ionic cordova and a flutter app as well.
GitHub Copilot being popular with large enterprises isn’t surprising. It’s a modern take on the old “No one ever got fired for buying X” where in this instance X is Microsoft. It’s the safe but boring choice. It’s the same reason for Teams vs Slack. Outlook vs anything else.
Small companies aren’t burdened by such limitations and will tend to choose the best tool for the job.
Philip: then again, we see GitHub Copilot is still the most popular tool even at the smallest companies - just with a smaller margin. I think your theory has legs to it, but the popularity of Copilot seems to run deeper to be honest (and I'd bet it has to do with being around for 2+ years longer than most its competition)
For sure. It’s been around longer, has better integrations into VSCode and GitHub. Given the popularity of GitHub it’s a no brainer for anyone to use Copilot. But on pure coding ability, other tools have caught up and big orgs are always slow at adapting.
Quote: But I wonder if the root problem is really with JIRA itself, or whether any project management tool idolised by managers would encounter the same pushback? It is rare to find a dev who loves creating and updating tickets, and writing documentation.
I think we can dig deeper a bit. I do believe that Kanban principles, which are at the foundation of all modern project management tools, are not compatible with software development. Kanban is good for an automobile factory conveyor belt; it's transactional in its nature, whereas software development is not transactional, because code lines are compounding on top of each other. It's like a building a skyscraper, and not assembling something from ready parts. Software development is much more creative than that.
Linear is #4 on the most loved tools here. Its better than Jira in almost every way. Jira is just very sticky, and the decision makers on when it's used are not the ones using it most.
Very interesting, thanks for the transparency
Surprised to see so many Ruby devs, not that far from Java. Can it be that someone from Shopify shared the survey internally and 350 engineers working there took it?😅
It will be interesting to know what type of local development environment including operating system is popular these days. How popular are remote coding environments? Are people still using remote VM for development? Some additional things - debugger, observability stack etc.
Thanks, Himadri! We didn’t ask about these topics, but I’m making a note for next time. Would have been nice to get details on eg cloud-based dev environments that were a hot topic in 2021-22… and then I’be just not sensed much excitement since? Or maybe AI tools took over the focus.
We will have o11y tools in part 2. Debuggers: not this time. Making another note :)
Making the "years experience" graph grayer as the numbers get larger is pretty funny...
I promise, not on purpose! Most graphs are like this, but I now CANNOT unsee it! Especially with a few gray hairs starting to appear on me as well, hah!
One key feature that GitHub Copilot offers to large companies is blocking suggestions matching public code.
I work in such a company and this feature is in fact annoying as it appears to trigger on our own public code! (Most of our code is public.)
My company won't consider AI tools that don't have this functionality due to liability concerns, which certainly limits the pool of available tools to pick from.
Thanks, I was waiting for this :D
One quick note on Bitrise, it doesn't do CI/CD just for native ios/android, it does for all e.g. we have it set up for an Ionic cordova and a flutter app as well.
Thanks, Umair! My bad: updated it.
GitHub Copilot being popular with large enterprises isn’t surprising. It’s a modern take on the old “No one ever got fired for buying X” where in this instance X is Microsoft. It’s the safe but boring choice. It’s the same reason for Teams vs Slack. Outlook vs anything else.
Small companies aren’t burdened by such limitations and will tend to choose the best tool for the job.
Philip: then again, we see GitHub Copilot is still the most popular tool even at the smallest companies - just with a smaller margin. I think your theory has legs to it, but the popularity of Copilot seems to run deeper to be honest (and I'd bet it has to do with being around for 2+ years longer than most its competition)
For sure. It’s been around longer, has better integrations into VSCode and GitHub. Given the popularity of GitHub it’s a no brainer for anyone to use Copilot. But on pure coding ability, other tools have caught up and big orgs are always slow at adapting.