Who Responded
Some interesting statistics about the survey:
The number of IT professionals in the organization:
There are always biases in surveys, including this one. For example, 98 percent of respondents worked in North America and everyone subscribes to a well-respected magazine (DDJ). Roughly half were developers, although we still had significant numbers of non-developer respondents; interestingly, the trends were similar regardless of the position held by the respondent, so this might not be a significant problem. As I point out in the main article, the questions surrounding agile techniques such as database regression testing and database refactoring may not have been clear to the respondents because the topics are new to most people. In short, the numbers might not be academically perfect, but I suspect that the potential challenges revealed by this survey are worthy of serious consideration. |