ADF EMG New Member 2012 Survey Results are in

[Chris Muir]

I'd like to announce the availability of the ADF EMG new member survey results for 2012.  Thanks to everyone who participated (and Simon who helps monitor the new members signing up), it provides an invaluable insight into what's actually happening with ADF "out there in the wild".

The 2012 results are of special interest as they represent just on 470 replies, a statistically significant collection of results, not to mention fantastic growth for the overall group, we nearly doubled our membership in 1 year!

In considering the 2012 results you can compare them to previous years:

2012 - http://bit.ly/adfemg2012survey

2011 - http://bit.ly/adfemg2011survey

<2011 - under the "ADF EMG Surveys" heading: http://bit.ly/wdy3ik

When assessing the results please remember this survey is for new members, who in turn are more likely to have just started developing with ADF and joined our group to assist that effort.  As such you can see a skew in the results to new development, not production or maintenance of ADF systems.

From my personal point of view what I found interesting in this survey, was 3 new questions we asked for 2012:

1) "What Continuous Integration server do you use/intend to use with JDeveloper (multiple answers allowed)"

A staggering ~60% said they didn't know what a CI server is or had no plans.  Eeks, so much for software development best practices.

Of note Hudson then came is at 20% and Jenkins less than 10%, which I think shows that the majority of Hudson/Jenkins potential users have stayed with Hudson (at least for now).

2) "What testing tools do you use/intend to use with JDeveloper (multiple answers allowed)"

Great to see 57% use JUnit in some form or other, and Selenium pops it's head up at ~24%.

3) "What Application Lifecycle Management tools will you use/intend to use with JDeveloper (multiple answers allowed)"

I'm not surprised to see Atlassian Jira here, though overall again I'm surprised to see that ~60% have no idea what an ALM tool is or don't intend to use one.

Finally in my favourite question of the survey which has been included in all the previous surveys too, we ask:

"If Uncle Larry offered to give you 1 ADF wish, what would you make that wish?"

Unfortunately for everyone who requested a huge pay cheque from Oracle and a Ferrari, we gave those all out in 2011, so you'll have to miss out I'm afraid.

I do see quite a few people asking for a free and/or open source version of ADF as well as a mobile version, of which we solved in part by the introduction of ADF Essentials (okay, admittedly not open source, but 1 step closer and it is free!) and ADF Mobile late in the year.

With a very unscientific method of using unique word counts, I do note a trend in this free for all question since 2011, that comments that relate to the word "bug" (as in "make JDev less buggy") are not as prominent which is good to see, but requests that relate to the word "fast" (as in "make JDev faster") still dominate and are constant.  On the later point the adoption of 11gR2 with it's faster OSGI loading will hopefully address this, but I suspect we wont see a clear trend for this until the majority of developers move to 11gR2 or 12c when it becomes available.

Anyway, enough of what I think, I'm curious to hear what others have to say about the results.

Regards,

CM.

[Chad Thompson]

On 14 Jan 2013, at 20:15, Chris Muir wrote:

From my personal point of view what I found interesting in this survey, was
3 new questions we asked for 2012:

A staggering ~60% said they didn't know what a CI server is or had no

plans. Eeks, so much for software development best practices.

...

I'm not surprised to see Atlassian Jira here, though overall again I'm
surprised to see that ~60% have no idea what an ALM tool is or don't intend
to use one.

Great observations - it seems that 60% of the respondents must also like to live with significantly higher stress levels than they need to!

… along the lines of the survey, I'd also be interested to know in the coming year (perhaps for next year's survey) what source control systems and tools (if using them at all!!) JDeveloper users are using, especially with 'git' integration rolling out in recent versions of JDeveloper.

• Chad

-- 
Chad Thompson 
chad_t...@mac.com

[Chris Muir]

Hi Marcelo

I don't think your first statement holds up. According to q17 over 65% of new members have never used Forms or more than 5 years ago & that was a similar trend in the 2011 survey. As such pointing to Forms customers as the luddites doesn't bare out at closer inspection, they are not the majority of ADF developers as the statistics show.

However I do agree there's always room for Oracle to assist customers with the on boarding to new tools, methodologies & more.

CM.

On 15/01/2013, at 8:26 PM, "Marcelo A. Vasquez (SOFTLOGIA S.R.L.)" <marcelo.v...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everybody

"A staggering ~60% said they didn't know what a CI server is or had no plans"

This indicator is because there are many developers "Oracle Forms" and are slowly moving towards ADF and toward new development methodologies, Subversion or Git, CI server, Scrum or ALM tool, others. I think Oracle needs to promote more development technologies (indirect business), this point helping to Oracle technology adoption in organizations.

Regards
Marcelo Vasquez
marcelo...@softlogia.com

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[John Flack]

We’ve never used CI servers (but at least I know what one is – Thanks Susan Duncan for enlightening me) because we’re so small, and often have one or two developers per development project.  So there isn’t much to integrate.  Most deployments are on demand – we put a JIRA task for the CM guy who does it.

I wonder if there are more shops like mine than I thought, with similar non-need for CI.

[Chad Thompson]

On 15 Jan 2013, at 9:19, John Flack wrote:

We’ve never used CI servers (but at least I know what one is – Thanks Susan Duncan for enlightening me) because we’re so small, and often have one or two developers
per development project.  So there isn’t much to integrate.  Most deployments are on demand – we put a JIRA task for the CM guy who does it.
I wonder if there are more shops like mine than I thought, with similar non-need for CI.

Even in the small shop/small team scenario (this is where I tend to be, too) - I like using CI servers like Hudson/Jenkins just to be a double-check that what is checked in to source control successfully builds and that (as often happens in Java development in my experience) one or two files haven't gone missing or have somehow not been merged successfully.

It's a nice check to make sure that what is in source control is actually what developers intend to be in source control. On the project I'm currently on, one of our devs even wrote a nice script that Hudson runs to verify that the database and source-controlled SQL scripts are in sync. Plus, when Hudson fails you know about it 'right away' so that you can (hopefully) fix the issue while what worked on your dev machine is still fresh in your mind.

-- 
Chad Thompson 
chad_t...@mac.com

[John Flack]

Believe me, if our CM guy can’t do a build because something is missing, we HEAR about it.

 

From: adf-met...@googlegroups.com [mailto:adf-met...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Chad Thompson

Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 10:26 AM
To: adf-met...@googlegroups.com

[Stephen Johnson]

My experience with CI is much like John’s, but my reasons for often wanting to implement CI are pretty much exactly what Chad states.

 

Stephen Johnson

Manager, Systems Architecture

Integretas, Inc.

 

From: adf-met...@googlegroups.com [mailto:adf-met...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Chad Thompson

Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 10:26 AM
To: adf-met...@googlegroups.com

--

[Jan Vervecken]

Thank you Chris.

- about "A staggering ~60% said they didn't know what a CI server is or had no plans.  Eeks, so much for software development best practices."
-- I wonder if this could be related to what is (not) in the Developer's Guide for ADF, where the term "continuous integration" [1] only seems to be mentioned in one single paragraph.

- [1] http://www.oracle.com/pls/as111160/search?remark=quick_search&word=continuous+integration&partno=b31974
or http://www.oracle.com/pls/as111230/search?remark=quick_search&word=continuous+integration&partno=e16182

regards
Jan Vervecken

[Jan Vervecken]

hi John Flack

The size of a team should not play a role in choosing the level of continuous integration (CI).

The level of CI can be any combination of automated compilation, testing (with or without dependencies, like a database), packaging, deploying, etcetera.
Many CI aspects could be driven by the idea that it should be known as soon as possible, if something no longer works like it did before, after changes have been made. So things can be fixed more quickly, at less cost.

It should be more the desire to build quality software that guides to choose a level of CI, which could result in peace of mind.

regards
Jan Vervecken

[Brian Huff]

Meh...

As a consultant, I have to deal with whatever crazy system the client is currently living with. I REFUSE to operate without source control or bug tracking: I use my own servers if the client has none... But CI? Not a deal breaker.

I completely understand it's importance for a distributed team. And I completely understand how useful it is. But in the grand scheme of things it's not a fight I'm wiling to have on a project-by-project basis.

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Brian 'Bex' Huff
Chief Software Architect
Bezzotech - THE Premier Oracle ECM Solution Provider
Email: b...@bezzotech.com
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Designing a Content Management or Enterprise 2.0 strategy? This may help:
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[Mark Robinson]

A client without source control?  Do those actually exist?

Mark

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[Chad Thompson]

On 15 Jan 2013, at 12:48, Mark Robinson wrote:

A client without source control?  Do those actually exist?

Short answer: "yes".

Slightly longer answer: Approaches to source control, working as a team and packaging can be very different in Java (or even just object oriented languages with many smaller source files) needs a different approach than the "workable" approaches with 4G development environments.

-- 
Chad Thompson 
chad_t...@mac.com