Survey: Spring or Spring Boot are used by 86% of the Java developers

Diffblue worked with Vanson Bourne to conduct a 15-question survey of 450 Java developers. The target respondents of this survey are Java developers who use Spring and other frameworks. Among the interviewees, 81% were men and 19% were women; most (53%) were between 35-44 years old.

The results show that 86% of Java software engineers rely on the Spring framework; 96% of Spring users said that this tool can help them become better Java developers. The report also pointed out that Spring/Spring Boot developers tend to pay more attention to unit testing than non-Spring users; they tend to have higher code quality and more maintainable code and have better code coverage in the organization.

The report points out that Spring users spend 25% of their time on testing, while non-Spring users spend 20% of their time on testing. Respondents said that the main benefit of Spring/Spring Boot is to save their time; secondly, the framework can better support unit testing.

However, even if they spend a lot of time writing and maintaining tests, 45% of respondents still said that their code test coverage is less than 50%; 37% said their coverage is between 26% and 50%; 25% of people reported that their coverage rate reached 76%-100%; only 6% of people said that their code coverage reached 100%. In the last 6%, all of them are Spring users.

Highlight

• Highly value Spring: 86% of respondents use Spring/Spring Boot, and 96% say they have benefited from using it
• Rank Testability fourth as a priority behind writing code that is reliable, modern and maintainable
• Spend 25% more time writing unit tests than non-Spring users (25% vs. 20%)
• Are more likely to say their organization’s ability to test code is ‘Excellent’ (54%, compared to only 44% of Non-Spring Framework Users and 39% of No-Framework Users)
• Report higher code coverage (all of the respondents who reported 100% Java unit test coverage were Spring/Spring Boot users; a quarter of Spring users say they have 76%-100% coverage)
• Are the most likely to agree that unit tests make it easier to modernize legacy code (93% of Spring users agreed, compared to 88% of non-Spring users and 79% of no-framework users) and migrate to the cloud (94% of Spring users agreed, vs. 80% of non-spring framework users, and 74% of no-framework users)
• Report that DevOps and Cybersecurity essentially tie for top organizational priority (>90% for both) followed by Cloud Adoption at 47%