Improving Code Quality

Working Environments of Survey Participants

Survey respondents were asked several questions to determine which technologies and types of projects they work with. Those questions follow in the figure captions, and the results are presented in chart form.

The distribution of developers in Figure 1-1 is probably unsurprising, given the nature of SIG’s consulting work and O’Reilly’s audience. That said, this survey sample might skew slightly toward developers who work in larger companies. Note, for example, the contrast with figures from StackOverflow’s 2016 Developer Survey: although that self-selected survey might contain its own biases, it is worth noting that about 25 percent of StackOverflow’s respondents report working in an enterprise of 1,000 employees or more, versus more than 35 percent of the respondents in the SIG/O’Reilly poll who report working in a large enterprise.

Figure 1-1. Which option describes your working situation best? (only one answer permitted)

It might be that large companies stand to benefit the most from giving systematic attention to code quality. When an organization has more developers and a larger code base, implementing best practices for code quality can have a much greater impact on maintainability, security, technical debt, and so on, thereby saving far more resources over time.

Although a clear majority of respondents ...