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Data-Developer Relations
Survey Results
from the September 2009 DDJ State of the IT Union
Survey
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The survey results are summarized in my November 2009 Agile Update entitled
Crossing the Developer-Data Divide.
Some findings include:
-
When it comes to
developers learning data skills,
61% of respondents work in organizations that expect developers to pick up data skills
on their own, 32% offered either mentoring by data professionals and/or pairing with
data professionals to developers, and only 18% work in organizations which offer some form of data training to
developers
- When it comes to
data professionals learning development skills, 40% of respondents work in organizations where data professionals are expected to pick
up development skills on their own, 36% work in organizations where data professionals either receive
mentoring in development skills from developers and/or pair with
developers, 17% work in organizations which provide development
training to data professionals
- It was easier to
onboard (add) new people onto iterative and agile teams that it was
traditional teams, which in turn fared better than ad-hoc teams
- Figure 1 shows that the quality of
documentation produced by iterative teams was perceived as being best,
agile and traditional teams produced equal quality documentation, and ad-hoc
teams were worst. However, all paradigms can clearly improve.
Figure 1. Quality of "deliverable documentation".
You may use this data
as you see fit, but may not sell it in whole or in part.
You may publish summaries of the findings, but if you do
so you must reference the survey accordingly (include
the name and the URL to this page). Feel free to
contact me
with questions. Better yet, if you publish,
please let me know so I can link to your work.
- People didn't know the purpose of the survey, so that likely removed
some bias. My strategy for the DDJ surveys is to send out a short
survey every two months entitled "State of the IT Union, DATE" but to not
indicate what the topic of the survey actually is (other than an IT topic of
course).
- This survey suffers from the
fundamental challenges faced by all surveys.
Links to Other Articles/Surveys
- My other surveys
Why Share This Much Information?
I'm sharing the results, and in particular the source data, of my surveys for
several reasons:
- Other people can do a much better job of analysis than I can. If
they publish online, I am more than happy to include links to their
articles/papers.
- Once I've published my column summarizing the data in DDJ, I really
don't have any reason not to share the information.
- Too many traditionalists out there like to use the "where's
the proof" question as an excuse not to adopt agile techniques. By
providing some evidence that a wide range of organizations seem to be
adopting these techniques maybe we can get them to rethink things a bit.
- I think that it's a good thing to do and I invite others to do the same.
