Who Responded

Some interesting statistics about the survey:

• The survey was sent out to 28,149 people on the DDJ mailing list.
• There were 1176 respondents:
• 618 developers
• 188 IT management
• 133 project managers
• 98 data professionals
• 139 others

The number of IT professionals in the organization:

• 29% had 10 or less
• 22% had 11 to 50
• 11% had 51 to 100
• 24% had 101 to 500
• 23% had 501 or more
• 78% of respondents indicated that they worked in the private sector

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.