Takeaways from the 2022 Developer Insights Survey

[grassl]

2022 marks the third running of our annual SAP Developer Insights Survey. As always, I’d like to extend a genuine “thank you” to everyone who took the time to participate and provide our insights. Thank you.

We just published the report, which summarizes the key takeaways.

• SAP’s developer audience is quite experienced. About 58% of respondents reported 6+ years of professional SAP project experience.


• For our developer audience, ERP and the Digital Core are the most common SAP application integration points, with 81% of respondents having built SAP ERP or Digital Core extensions in the past year.
  YouTube and LinkedIn are the best non-SAP sites for connecting with other developers.

And here are a few extra observations of my own:

1. Organic search engines such as Google have become the dominant starting point for your information searches when looking for help. We have observed this also from our web analytics and continue to build this into our strategy. Improving organic search is an ongoing activity for us. In addition, we will look for ways to better organize related information, whether that’s through improving our externally facing structure or simply improving our tagging of existing content.


2. Videos are an increasingly popular learning format. If you subscribe to our SAP Developers YouTube Channel, you can see that we’re continuing to increase our investment in developer-oriented video content.  If you haven’t seen that channel or have not visited recently – well – you should.

I want to point out that we take the data we gather seriously for our programs and product strategy. There might be information in the report that will be useful to you or your organization as well.  Take some time and have a look https://developers.sap.com/insights-survey-results-2022.html.

If you have questions about the results, or thoughts you’d like to share, drop a comment and we are looking forward to the discussion

[svethaiyer]

Thanks Thomas. Great Insights.

My question is : how would you use these insights to better our Dev reach programs/Startegy? What are the top asks from our SAP Dev ecosystem? What ask would you say are/is the most important ones/one and how do we plan on delivering that?

[grassl]

Hi Svetha, probably for each question/result, you or our partners can consider what this means for planning and the product offering. E.g. what skills are currently in the developer ecosystem? Who would be most likely to implement it, you can see there is a high concentration on SAP-specific IT and SAP implementation partners.

Also, section V on Software Experience is helpful to see if the current developer community has the skills for the product offering. Some skills are ready to take it on, for others, more learning is required, or also it could mean recruiting from other ecosystems.

 

[mmcisme1]

It's great seeing the results of the survey!   It is hard seeing the lack of respondents.  Only 1,007 respondents from 63 countries.   That's very low overall.   But a subset usually does show what the majority will.

I wonder if there is a better way to drive up the response to the survey?  For example, and it's been a long time so it might have already been there, on our SAP developer youtube channel, make it a contest...   Of course, it's been  a while and I don't even remember if I took it or not.  (I think I did).

What question provided the best information for you?  Anything you can share about the outcome of the survey would be helpful.   I know future projects - it's hard to answer that one.

Anyway loved seeing both the questions and answers. 

[rileyrainey]

Hi Michelle,

We are always looking to increase participation in this survey. But - from a statistical point of view - the response counts for 2022 still allow us to make conclusions with confidence where we needed.  For what it is worth, this survey is important but not the only source of data that we gather over the course of each year. We engage in one-on-one interviews and also work with external analysts and consultants to build a richer picture of what's going on in our Developer ecosystem.

We are also exploring ways to get more information - maybe in smaller chunks. I don't think this annual survey will ever completely shut down but we'll likely find ways to integrate smaller scale external surveys into the mix as I think you are suggesting.

It is hard to pin down a specific question that gave us the most useful answer this year.  There's many areas of focus for us internally that lead to different lines of questioning in the survey. But here's an example: for several years running we asked the question, "What is your preferred resource if you need help or have a challenge with the SAP technology or tool you are working with?”. For the first time, respondents reported that organic search (e.g., Google) was the top starting point.  This is a source of ongoing conversation inside SAP - we strive to make our sites more usable as a unit but this clearly indicates that search short-circuits at least some of this.  We conclude that continuing to invest in SEO for technical content is key - the fact that search works for most folks (or, at least, is at the top in these responses) says we're at least modestly effective on that count - but we see continued focus as vital.

I'm glad the survey was interesting to you.

Riley