We normally publish the annual external report for our annual SAP Developer Insights Survey directly on SAP Developer Center. This year we encountered an unfortunate process issue that delayed publishing this report on that site: rather than delaying it further, I'm posting a copy of the report here for Community review and discussion. We'll post the final copy on developers.sap.com as soon as practical.
Role Overlaps for external SAP developers
Part I: Introduction and General Information
Welcome to the 2024 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 population. 2024 is the fifth year we have conducted the survey. The survey program is led by the SAP Ecosystem and Community team. Key support is provided by the SAP Global Experience Management Office. Several other SAP teams provide advice and inputs to survey content. Those teams are listed at the end of this report.
This year's survey was open for six weeks - from mid-January through the end of February.
Each year's survey is composed of a mix of new topic questions and repeat select questions from past years to track trends.
Key Findings from the 2024 Survey
SAP Low Code / No Code Use is Increasing - this is true both on production Extension projects and proportional to competitor Low Code / No Code products
Increasing Presence of Solution Architects - this is a trend we noted last year and it continues this year. 42% of respondents now report that they acted in the role of Solution or Application Architect in the last year -- this proportion has been consistently rising and is up by a net 20% in the past two years. This role is probably underserved in our current external outreach and is likely a good area to focus upon for new programs.
SAP Developer Satisfaction is flat or slightly declining - 70% of respondents report they are “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with their development work with SAP. This is down from 75% in 2023 -- lower, but just within the margin of error for responses to this question.
Back-to-Office trend slowing - we have been tracking these numbers since 2021. Additional 2024 respondents report settling back into a tradition office work environment, but the rate of the shift has slowed.
BTP Developers Guide - limited awareness -- this important guidance document was announced at TechEd this past November, but barely half of respondents were aware of its existence.
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 and Relation to SAP
Employment
"What is your current employment status?"
SAP Developer Community Composition
We have seen no significant change in these breakdowns from year to year.
SAP Developer Community Age Distribution
There is a modest decrease this year in the two eldest age categories. There is a corresponding increase in the 35-44 bucket. We cannot produce an accurate median age from the way that we currently gather this information.
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 the data we'll consider in these ways:
- External Developers Only - we exclude responses from SAP employees, and others (students, analysts, etc.)
- 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
Workplace and Trends
Office Location
"As of right now, where do you primarily physically work from?"
Year-to-year trend in Workplace
This shows a slowing trend of employees moving back to conventional offices from home. From a past Developer Survey, 29% of respondents reported they had primarily worked at home prior to the pandemic.
Where are the Developers?
We asked, "Which country are you based in?"
 | Respondent Count
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By country, India has the largest number of respondents and probably the densest geographic concentration, followed by Germany, and then the USA. When grouped by SAP region, however, EMEA North is largest.
Development Job Roles
We asked respondents which common development-related roles they perform.
"Which roles describe your day-to-day work? (Select all that apply)"
Respondents often "wear multiple hats" in their job. This question is asked in "select all that apply" form to capture that information.
The Venn diagram on the right depicts the relative overlaps of the top seven roles reported by respondents. The area of each overlapping region reflects the count respondents performing the overlapping roles. For example, from this we can seel that all (UX) "Designers" are also "Developers". Most but not quite all "Enterprise Architects" also are "Solution Architects".
It is unsurprising that the "Developer" role leads. Architecture roles as a group have increased each year. Solution/Application developer shows roughly a ten percent increase, year to year. This probably corresponds to SAP Developers' steady move to the Cloud -- cloud extensibility offers more choices in solving a given business problem, and Solution Architects are the role responsible most often for making such decisions.
Development Domains
For respondents selecting "Developer" as one of their roles, we were interested in the specific application domains they work in:
"Which of the following development domains describe your day-to-day work? (select all that apply)"
Year to year, Integration came in higher than we expected. Mobile web front-end development is more common than native mobile application development. This isn't completely unexpected, but worth noting.
Recent SAP Project Experience?
"Have you developed integrations or extensions for any SAP products or technologies in the past 12 months?"
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 70% of developers answered "Yes" here.
Popular Programming Languages
"Which programming languages have you used in your development work over the past 12 months? Please select all that apply."
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 hasn't changed much, year to year.
We extended our survey beyond just 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.
Front-Ends
Back-Ends
Application and Business Technology Platform Architectures
SAP applications can be extended using any one of several architectural approaches. These can be grouped into two major classes: on-stack (in-app) and side-by-side (essentially, BTP-based).
We were wondering which approaches are most popular.
Popular Extension Architectures
"For the most recent extension project that you were part of, what was the principal runtime architecture of the back-end elements?"
We don't distinguish between newer and older applications (e.g., S/4HANA vs. ECC) -- this likely explains the dominance of "on-stack ABAP". Aside from the obvious dominance of ABAP, we can also see that CAP is relatively popular. We also, somewhat unexpectedly, see that Low Code/No Code products like Build Apps and Build Process Automation have quickly grown in popularity -- this question is asking about real production projects, and seeing those two account for roughly 10% is an interesting surprise. Basically, they have only been available in the last year.
ABAP and CAP both have style or language variants in their respective frameworks.
ABAP can be programmed as "ABAP for Cloud Development" or "ABAP Standard". CAP is available in JavaScript or Java language variants.
Where the respondent selected ABAP or CAP, we asked about the variant used on the project:
ABAP Variants
CAP Variants
The roughly 50-50 breakdown of ABAP styles is consistent with responses elsewhere in the survey. It reflects that roughly half of the ABAP projects are ECC or very early forms of S/4HANA.
CAP/JavaScript if plainly most popular for CAP projects. It was curious that CAP/Java wasn't used all by itself and this gave us pause to go look at the data carefully. Recall that these results apply to external SAP Developers only. When we consider SAP employees as well, we do see projects that are CAP/Java-only. We have no explanation for why external developers might use both concurrently on a project. That's something maybe for follow-up investigation.
Popular IDEs
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.
Preferred IDE or Editor
"Which IDE or text editor do you most commonly use for development tasks?"
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.
Potential / Use of Generative AI for Developers
Generative AI for Developers
"Generative AI (GenAI) has been an exciting topic for developers in 2023. Looking forward, which of these GenAI capabilities do you expect will be useful in your work? Select the choice that best describes your interest or use for each technology area."
As these capabilities were not generally available in SAP products at the time of the survey, we posed a series of questions intended to gauge their interest in particular features that might be based on Generative AI technologies. Since one or more of these features might be available in non-SAP products, we included choices in each category for the respondent to state that they have either evaluated such a capability or are even using it today.
An brief explanation of each category was included in the survey and is shown below:
Code Generation and Autocompletion: GenAI tools can generate code snippets, complete lines of code, or suggest entire functions based on the context provided by the developer.
Bug Detection and Code Review: AI models can be trained to identify potential bugs and vulnerabilities in the code. They can also suggest improvements in code quality, best practices, and code consistency.
Automated Testing and Test Data Generation: GenAI can be used to create test cases, which can help in thoroughly testing software applications. This includes generating test data that covers edge cases, potentially reducing the time and effort in manual testing.
Documentation Generation: AI can assist in generating and updating technical documentation. It can interpret the code and create comprehensive documentation, which is crucial for maintaining and scaling software projects.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Code: AI models can translate natural language queries into code, allowing developers to express their intent in plain language. This can be particularly helpful for novice developers working with unfamiliar frameworks.
Customized User Experience Design: AI can help generate user interface designs to enhance user experience.
AI-Powered Development Tools: Integration of AI in IDEs for real-time assistance, such as suggesting optimizations, refactoring code, or even predicting the next steps in development.
Automated Code Refactoring: AI can assist in code refactoring by suggesting or even implementing improvements in code structure.
Software Design and Architecture: AI can help in generating software design patterns or architectural models based on specified requirements. This can speed up the initial stages of development and ensure adherence to best practices.
Enhanced Security Protocols: Generative AI can be used to develop advanced security protocols and encryption methods, providing robust security solutions in software applications.
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 short.
Developer Satisfaction with SAP
SAP Development Satisfaction
"For your recent experience developing an integration or extension, how would you describe your overall satisfaction with SAP?"
Roughly 70% of respondents report they are “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with their development work with SAP. This is down from 75% reported in 2023 -- a lower number, but just within the margin of error for responses to this question.
BTP Developers Guide
Awareness and Use of the BTP Developers Guide
"A new BTP Developers Guide was announced at SAP’s TechEd this past November. Which statement best described your level of familiarity with this document?"
Nearly half of respondents were unaware of this document's release. Raising awareness for this and other related BTP framework documents would be a good goal for 2024.
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 of several 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.
Using Cloud Providers?
"Are you using any cloud providers for your development projects?"
We asked, "Which cloud providers are you using for development projects?" and we asked in a way to separate SAP-related projects from more general use.
SAP Business Technology Platform
Microsoft Azure
Amazon Web Services
Google Cloud Platform
Alibaba Cloud
Low / No Code Tools
This is the third consecutive year in which we've asked questions around Low Code and No Code products. The list was composed of leaders in the 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 more recent data.
For each product, we asked respondents to select the most applicable category reflecting their awareness or use of the product (e.g., "I am aware of the product", "We plan to use the product", "We are currently using the product in production", ...). We normalized the tallies for each year to adjust for the annual variation in overall survey response counts. We then filtered down to just examine productive use:
| Productive use of Product | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
| Vendor A | 36% | 33% | 28% |
| SAP Build Process Automation | 0% | 8% | 22% |
| SAP Build Apps | 4% | 14% | 20% |
| Vendor B | 24% | 19% | 13% |
| SAP Signavio | 9% | 10% | 8% |
| Vendor C | 12% | 8% | 5% |
| Vendor D | 4% | 2% | 2% |
| Vendor E | 5% | 3% | 1% |
| Vendor F | 5% | 3% | 1% |
Learning and Help Resources
We were interested in preferences in the format or media type of learning resources by respondents.
Preferred General Technical Resources
"When learning new skills or technical subjects over the past 12 months, what resources did you tend use the most? Please select up to three resources."
On the topic of Help, we shifted in this next question from formats to specific web sites.
Top SAP Help Resource Sites
"What is your preferred resource if you need help, or have a challenge with the SAP technology / tool you are working with? "
Almost sixty percent of respondents say they use organic search or SAP Community as their primary source of SAP help. This is consistent with past years. This continues to demonstrate good visibility of the Community site overall and likely speaks well for the usefulness of the site content.
SAP Learning Hub Subscribers
"Do you have a subscription to SAP Learning Hub?"
Technical Certifications
"How many technology-related certification programs have you completed within the past four years?"
Satisfaction with SAP Learning Hub
Overall Learning Hub Satisfaction
"How would you describe your overall satisfaction with SAP Learning Hub?"
Survey Methodology
This report is based on a Qualtrics web-based survey of 979 respondents from 56 countries. The survey ran for six calendar weeks between January 15th and March 1st, 2024. Ninety percent of the respondents invested ten 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 posts.
Other References
The annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey is an excellent (and no-cost) reference for industry-wide habits of developers.
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