Developers' Top Pain Points in Open Source Runtimes
December 03, 2018

Bart Copeland
ActiveState

ActiveState surveyed developers and programmers in 92 countries to better understand their pain points and assess how businesses can better work with their organizations. The survey results establish a starting point for understanding the challenges that coders (developers, engineers, data scientists, QA and so on) confront when working with open source runtimes.

Blocks to Productivity

One fact the survey highlighted is that developers need to streamline their workflow in order to increase productivity. Developers and programmers spend only two to four hours of their day programming, on average. Productivity is disrupted due to time spent managing other issues such as polyglot environments and retrofitting. Enterprises are lacking resources that developers need to streamline their workflow.

The survey confirmed that security, defined here as being up to date with the latest or most secure version of packages used, is suffering. Management is unable to assess risks due to lack of visibility. For instance, 61 percent of respondents found it difficult or very difficult to get information about package quality – security, activity or updates.

Production code isn't being tracked, creating a gap in vulnerability assessment. This creates additional issues in security as there is lack of visibility of where code is specifically running that requires updates or patches. Consequently, half of developers surveyed expressed a deep concern about security.

In addition, new tool adoption turns out to be more cumbersome than helpful. In fact, developers already spend 74 % of their time managing dependencies and development tools. A whopping 67 % – more than two-thirds – opted out of implementing a new programming language due to the hassle of incorporating a new programming language. Not surprisingly, adding or incorporating a programming language into an organization was rated the most difficult challenge, by a significant margin; 56% of all respondents rated this as difficult or very difficult.

Bridging the Developer-Enterprise Gap

The above survey data is an invaluable tool to measure and track progress towards solving open source runtime pains that developers are experiencing. In order to relieve developers of these pains and better enable quicker release updates, we need to look at a top-down and bottom-up approach. The gap between the developer and the enterprise needs to be bridged through clear communication of needs.

One approach is to have a "bill of materials" of all the packages running in production as well as the applications and their respective dependencies of where the code is running.

Another approach is to facilitate the developer implementing what's required from a license and security perspective. Solving developers' problem spots will increase their productivity and their job satisfaction, benefiting developers and their organizations alike.

Bart Copeland is CEO and President of ActiveState
Share this

Industry News

November 30, 2023

Parasoft, a global leader in automated software testing solutions, today announced complete support for MISRA C++ 2023 with the upcoming release of Parasoft C/C++test 2023.2.

November 30, 2023

Solo.io achieved the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Ready designation from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

November 29, 2023

CircleCI implemented a gen2 GPU resource class, leveraging Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) G5 instances, offering the latest generation of NVIDIA GPUs and new images tailored for artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) workflows.

November 29, 2023

XM Cyber announced new capabilities that provide complete and continuous visibility into risks and vulnerabilities in Kubernetes environments.

November 29, 2023

PerfectScale has achieved the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Ready designation from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

November 28, 2023

BMC announced two new product innovations, BMC AMI DevX Code Insights and BMC AMI zAdviser Enterprise.

November 28, 2023

Rafay Systems announced the availability of the Rafay Cloud Automation Platform — the evolution of its Kubernetes Operations Platform — to enable platform teams to deliver automation and self-service capabilities to developers, data scientists and other cloud users.

November 28, 2023

Bitrise is integrating with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide compliance-conscious companies with greater access to CI/CD capabilities for mobile app development.

November 28, 2023

Armory announced a new unified declarative deployment capability for AWS Lambda.

November 27, 2023

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce announced a significant expansion of their long standing, global strategic partnership, deepening product integrations across data and artificial intelligence (AI), and for the first time offering select Salesforce products on the AWS Marketplace.

November 27, 2023

Veracode announced product innovations to enhance the developer experience. The new features integrate security into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and drive adoption of application security techniques in the environments where developers work.

November 27, 2023

Couchbase announced a new Capella columnar service on Amazon Web Services (AWS), enabling organizations to harness real-time analytics to build adaptive applications.

November 21, 2023

Redgate announced the launch of Redgate Test Data Manager, which simplifies the challenges that come with Test Data Management (TDM) and modern software development across multiple databases.

November 21, 2023

mabl announced an integration with GitLab, the AI-powered DevSecOps platform.

November 21, 2023

FusionAuth announced the availability of new software development kits (SDKs) that support Angular, React and Vue JavaScript front-end frameworks.