2023 SAP Developer Insights Survey
2,467 Responses from Developers in 79 Countries
Part I: Introduction and General Information
Welcome to the 2023 SAP Developer Insights Survey report. This annual survey targets SAP’s existing external developer audience. It is used to track demographics, usage patterns and trends within that group. 2023 represents the fourth consecutive year we have conducted the survey. The survey program is led by the SAP Developer Relations and Community team. Key support is provided by the SAP Global Experience Management Office.
This year's survey was open from mid-January through the end of February.
Key Findings from the 2023 Survey
Several interesting points stood out for us in this year’s data:
- Developers and Architects dominate the makeup of our community – the large segment of developers (74%) is not a surprise, however, the proportion of folks designing application architectures continues to increase year-over-year – increasing to 34% this year compared to 22% in 2022. The signals a need for solid support of architecture design enablement by SAP
- Around three quarters of respondents describe their overall SAP development experience as being Satisfied or Very Satisfied – this is the first year that we asked any question focusing on sentiment. We’ll probably explore this more deeply next year
- Substantially increased interest in Low / No-Code products - We see a dramatic increase in both interest and use of Low Code and No Code products since the 2022 survey. This increase was seen across all vendors that we included in the survey.
- Work moving back to a traditional office space – roughly a third of respondents now report their primary work location is outside their home. One-fifth of the respondents shifted away from their home office in the past year.
These topics will be covered in more detail in the rest of the report.
General Topics
We included a number of general questions in the survey covering such topics as age, work location and status, as well as role.
Employment Status
We have seen no significant change in this breakdown from year to year.
Age Distribution
There is a modest but statistically significant increase in the 55+ category. There is a small increase in the 18-24 bucket. We cannot produce an accurate median age from the way that we currently gather this information.
Workplace and Trends
This shows a clear trend of employees moving back to the offices from home.
Where are the Developers?
We asked, "Which country are you based in?"
By country, India has the largest number of respondents and probably the densest geographic concentration, followed by Germany, and then the USA. You can consult the chart at the top of this report to see a grouping by SAP business regions. Of course, Europe is composed of many smaller countries and two SAP regions, EMEA and MEE – if we add those two regions together, it is larger than India alone and roughly eaqual to the count for all of Asia.
Respondents by SAP Region and Country
Development Job Roles
We asked respondents which common development-related roles they perform.
It is unsurprising that "Developer" leads. Architecture roles as a group have increased year-to-year. The relative 3:1 proportion ratio between Application and Enterprise Architects remains the same.
Development Domains
For respondents selecting "Developer" as one of their roles, we were interested in the specific application Domains they work in:
Integration came in higher than we expected. Mobile web front-end development is roughly equal to traditional mobile application development. This isn't completely unexpected, but worth noting. We'll likely include this question in future surveys to track trends.
Extension and Integration are key scenarios for developers working with SAP applications. We wanted to focus on developers with recent experience in these areas. Roughly 65% of developers answered "Yes" here.
Part II. Narrowing the Response Set
A primary objective of our survey is to build a model of our community's usage patterns. It helps us build more effective programs. With that goal in mind, in the remainder of the report we will narrow our data we'll consider in these ways:
- External Developers Only - we exclude responses from industry analysts, SAP employees, and students.
- Recent Development Experience - we only include responses from those who stated that they had been part of an SAP extension or integration project within the past year
This filtering reduces the number of respondents for all remaining questions from the original 2,400+ down to around roughly 1,100 respondents.
Popular Programming Languages
This was posed as a multiple response question. ABAP dominates, as it has in every year of our survey. JavaScript is very popular as well, which could be attributed to its use in both SAPUI5 and CAP. Java and Python are roughly tied for third place. The relative positions of these top four languages has been relatively stable year to year.
We extended this year's survey beyond language use to ask about popular frameworks.
Popular Programming Frameworks
We asked respondents who are Developers to pick which common front and back-end frameworks they have worked with in the past year.
IDEs and Command Line usage
We are always curious about general work patterns of developers. We asked about developer's most commonly used editors. While it would be difficult in such a survey of all developers to add many questions, we were particularly curious about most popular IDE or editor. We were also curious about the prevalence of command-line-oriented development.
The possible responses for this question were organized in this way:
- I use command line tools but less frequently than I use the BTP Cockpit or other web based tools
- I use command line tools more often than I use the Cockpit or web-based tools
- I do not use command-line development tools for my work with BTP
- I was unaware there were command line tools available for this purpose
The editor of choice will depend on the language. For example, BAS does not currently support ABAP. This might contribute to its relatively low preference. At the same time, SAP GUI and – arguably – Eclipse are the primary editors for ABAP, so it's maybe no surprise that they are reflected as most popular. As a follow-on, we might look at the editor choices here for CAP/JS, CAP/Java, and ABAP developers separately.
We draw no conclusions from the breakdown of command-line versus web-based BTP development – only to point out that both are popular today: roughly 40% of respondents work in both environments.
Business Technology Platform Environments
BTP offers developers their choice of four distinct deployment environments. We were curious about the relative awareness and use of each environment. The scale of each chart reflects the count of respondents selecting a particular choice. The charts for all platforms have the same Y-Axis scale to allow for easier comparison between platforms. The Neo environment has been deprecated for some time, but remains supported for existing applications. These data do not indicate the count of applications that are be deployed on each platform, only their relative use by developers.
Use of GitHub
One of our stakeholder teams was interested in posing these questions around use of GitHub in our community. GitHub is one of several on-line systems hosting git. Another developer survey which is wider in scope than our own puts use of git at almost 94% among developers. That same survey also demonstrates git is the most popular version control system by a very wide margin. We can only speculate that better integrated support for git in SAP development IDEs and tools chains would lead to closer alignment with the industry overall.
Use of Select SAP Technologies
In past surveys we asked questions around the awareness and use of select SAP technologies. The list changes year to year. This year we asked more specific questions elsewhere, so the list is shorter. We focus on HANA and other SAP Database and Data Management tools alongwith SAP Integration Suite.
Developer Satisfaction with SAP
Cloud Insights
We first asked respondents if they used any cloud providers for their projects. For those that answered, "yes", we asked about the use ofseveral major providers, including SAP BTP. We also asked if their use included SAP or non-SAP projects. This information was condensed into a chart depicting the relative use of each cloud provider.
Similar to the earlier questions around BTP Environments, these numbers do not reflect a tally of projects for each platform - instead it reflects developer exposure to each.
Low / No Code Tools
This is the second consecutive year in which we've asked questions around Low Code and No Code products. The list used in both years was composed of leaders in the then current Gartner LCNC Magic Quadrant Report and select SAP products. SAP Process Automation – now Build Process Automation – was not yet announced at the time of the 2022 survey, so it only appears in the 2023 data. Comparing the 2022 data to 2023, we see a dramatic increase (by a factor of two or three) in interest across all Low/No-Code products appearing in the survey.
For each product, we asked respondents to select the most applicable category reflecting their awareness or use. These questions were organized as a single large matrix of boxes in Qualtrics - There is no "I am unfamiliar with this product" response. Instead, the respondent simply would skip checking one of the other boxes.
We then used the responses to compare the general interest and use of products. This chart reflects the sum of all but the final("discontinued use") categories for each product. A comparison of the two years would be incomplete if we didn’t also account for the fact that there were fewer total respondents in 2022 (1,007 vs. 2,467). We scaled the raw 2022 count up by a factor of 2.45 to account for that. Even with that generous scaling present, the data still reflects a 16% increase in “interest and engagement” for this year.
Learning and Help Resources
We were interested in preferences in the format or media type of learning resources by respondents.
On the topic of Help, we shifted in this next question from formats to specific web sites.
Sixty percent of respondents picked one of the top three: SAP Community, SAP Support, and organic web search. In last year's survey, organic search (e.g., Google Search) was at the top. Community tops this year by a significant margin. This probably demonstrates good visibility of Community site overall and likely speaks well for the usefulness of that site.
Survey Methodology
This report is based on a web-based survey of 2,463 respondents from 79 countries. The survey ran for six calendar weeks between January 16th and February 28th, 2023. Ninety percent of the respondents invested 10 minutes or less with the survey.
The survey was promoted via the SAP Community website and the SAP Developer Center, sap.com pop-up intercepts, social media, and newsletters.