SAP Community - Riley Rainey

The 2023 SAP Business Experts Insights Survey: Charts, Findings, and More Charts

2023-12-08T16:01:12+01:00

This fall, we surveyed Business Experts in the SAP Community about the tasks the perform and the tools that they use. This blog post is a report on the survey results.

Introduction

SAP application implementation teams are composed of folks with a mix of skills. Developers are present, to be sure, but these teams also traditionally include functional business experts. These business experts provide knowledge that is essential to a successful implementation.

Earlier in the fall, we ran our first Business Experts survey. That survey is an offshoot of our annual survey of developers. We have consistently uncovered useful information through the developer survey and we were curious if we could find actionable insights about business domain experts.

Key Findings

We ran the survey for four weeks in September and October. We had 1,333 respondents. Of those, approximately 670 completed all questions in the survey.

We asked questions on a variety of topics: the tasks that business users perform, and the tools specific to such tasks. Data analytics and business process modeling were two such focus areas. Since this audience also might also be users of Low Code / No Code (LCNC) application development tools, we asked a series of detailed questions to respondents who said they'd been users of such technology.

Among the results we found most interesting:

Low Code / No Code application development is not yet clearly understood by many potential users – A portion of our survey explored Low Code / No Code tool familiarity and use. We approached this from an industry-wide point of view, not focusing exclusively on SAP products. Roughly half of respondents agree that they understand the concept behind LCNC application development. The remaining half did not. There is an opportunity to educate those folks who are unfamiliar.

Motivation for using LCNC app dev tools lines up well with analyst expectations – For folks who have worked with these tools, the top reason for starting a LCNC-base app dev project was, “I got results faster than if I’d waited for someone else to do the work.” (40%). Individual learning also was a factor here: “Doing it for the learning experience” came in second place (24%).

LCNC App Dev projects are generally considered successful – Of the respondents who developed and deployed LCNC applications, 73% of them agree that they believe the business outcome from developing the application themselves was better for their company than if someone else did the work.

But There is Relatively Low Activity of Among True Citizen Developers – only 4% of Customer respondents say they have developed a production LCNC app – while that number seems quite low, there is strong interest in exploring these tools (65%) among the same group.

Low Code / Node Code Tools are being employed more by Partner and Freelance Consultants – LCNC tools are not just for Citizen Developers – Pro-developers can and do use LCNC tools: Roughly 10% of respondents among Partners and Freelance Consultants say they have developed production LCNC apps. And where they have, they tend to produce significantly more applications per person than those from Customers.

LCNC app dev tools are quite popular as a simpler way to deliver Smartphone and Tablet apps - 56% and 37%, respectively, for all LCNC app dev projects that were part of the survey.

More Background

In the past, our team’s external research has focused on professional developers. A major part of that research has been invested in the annual SAP Developer Insights Survey (2023 report link)

With the introduction of the SAP Build portfolio in late 2022, SAP’s technology focus related to application development expanded to include support for Citizen Developers – folks completely outside Customer IT organizations and Partners. This expansion shifts the line where developer tools are relevant and it motivated us to explore LCNC products as part of this survey.

Results and Analysis

Chart Notation Used in this Report

We asked respondents to tell us about their relation to SAP. We use that in our analysis to help identify patterns. Customers, Partners, Freelance Consultants, and sometimes SAP employees all are represented in this report in different contexts. To be as clear as possible, we will include a legend to show which subgroups make up each chart’s source data.

Chart Notation

Respondent Demographics

SAP Community is composed of people from different organizations: Customers, Partners, and SAP employees all participate. We asked about this relationship:

For the remainder of this report, unless we state otherwise, employees of SAP will be excluded from all reporting. Excluding SAP employees from the same question gives us an idea of the external constituent groups:

From this we see that Customers make up about a third of our external community.

We also asked about the industry of their employer:

We asked about their age. We have no industry data applicable to business users to compare here, so we can’t draw any conclusion about the relative age of SAP business experts.

A breakdown of geography is consistent with our past surveys of SAP Developers.

Tasks Performed by Business Experts

Early in the survey, we asked a series of questions exploring the tasks performed as part of the respondent’s job. Within the survey, this task inventory was formulated in this way:

This series of questions listed thirteen task areas:

Data Analysis

Process Modeling

Project Management

Creating Business Cases

Requirements Gathering

Documenting User Stories and Use Cases

Stakeholder Management

Cost/Benefits Analysis

Quality Assurance

User Acceptance Testing

Risk Assessment

Market Analysis

Vendor Evaluation

The questions were composed to provide a simple gauge whether a task might be part of their role. We didn’t expect particularly accurate results if we asked a respondent to estimate the actual time or percentage of their work devoted to each task, so we limited responses to “significant”, “sometimes”, “rarely”, and “never”.

We guessed that responses from Customers might be different than from Partners, so we plotted each group independently:

Customer Tasks

Partner Tasks

The differences in these two charts are not dramatic. Some tasks that might be related more to consulting do appear more prevalent for Partners: Requirements Gathering, Creating User Stories or Use Cases, QA, UAT.

There’s an opportunity for deeper analysis here. For example, we might look at the tasks performed by specific job roles (we asked about roles later in the survey). Such analysis remains to be explored but, for now, what seems plain is that no task dominates when we group all business folks together.

From this point in the survey, we branched out into three distinct lines of questions. For those that said Data Analysis was part of their work, we asked about the tools that they use. We did the same thing for Process Modelers. And, since Low Code / No Code (LCNC) application development might be performed by anyone, we asked everyone a series of questions about their familiarity and use of LCNC application development products.

Analytics Tool Use

We composed a list of common tools representing a range of sophistication. Everything from basic tools like Excel to more elaborate, data science-oriented tools such as Python and R frameworks appeared in our list of choices. Respondents were asked to select all that they had used in the past year.

S/4HANA and ECC appear prominently in these results, as does SAP Analytics Cloud, and Business Objects.

Process Modeling Tool Use

As with Data Analytics, we chose a list of popular Process Modeling tools with a range of capabilities. Everything from Visio and Lucidchart – limited to visual mapping and flowcharting – to SAP Build Process Automation and SAP Signavio. We also included platform-specific offerings for comparison: Salesforce, and ServiceNow.

Visio comes in first, which might demonstrate that there’s an opportunity to convert such users to true automation tools. SAP tools figure prominently in the results, too. SAP Build Process Automation is not far behind Visio, in fact.

As follow-up research, it might be interesting to explore any overlap between those using simpler versus more automated tools: to what extent are folks using both? And – if so – why?

Low Code / No Code Application Development

We started with a basic question: does the respondent know what the terms Low Code / No Code mean?

So, 83% of our external audience have at least heard the term. Only half, though, feel like they completely understand. That’s an opportunity for education.

Of that 83%, we asked more questions. Do they think these tools might be relevant to them – or perhaps they have already jumped in and developed an application – here’s the breakdown:

There’s two points that stand out in this: first almost 60% of respondents express interest in these tools but have not yet explored them. Clearly that’s an opportunity to engage. Also, only 10% of the audience has actually developed an application (and that number is lower still when you consider that this is among the ~80% that said they’d been exposed to LCNC app dev, at least conceptually). Moreover, we are asking about LCNC app dev in general here. Given that LCNC application development tools have been in the market for quite some time, this calls into question how universally useful LCNC tools might be to business users.

For those stating that they had developed one or more applications, we asked a longer series of questions: How many of these applications have they developed in the last year? What tool did they use on their last project? What was their motivation and general experience?

LCNC Applications Developed - All non-SAP Respondents

Close to half the people in this group responded saying they had developed four or more applications. That’s an unexpectedly large number of applications per person. We are considering both Customers and Partners/Freelancers here. What if we just consider Customers?

LCNC Applications Developed - Customers only

So, Customer business experts are generating fewer applications in the same time span. That makes sense.

What about the most popular tools for Low Code / No Code application development?

SAP Build Apps comes in at the top by a comfortable margin. The ”Other…” response appeared prominently here and respondents were permitted to specify the unlisted tool. Those responses were:

SAP Analytics Cloud 2

Neptune Software 1

CAP (not an LCNC tool) 1

Boomi 1

BRFPlus 1

Another aspect worth noting is that the list of popular products was short. We had selected a list of thirteen candidate products to appear in the survey: most highly rated by analysts. Only four products appear more than once in the responses: SAP Build Apps (14), Microsoft Power Apps (3), SAP Analytics Cloud (2), and Mendix (2). Given the relative maturity of the LCNC product category, we would have expected more diversity in this list.

Target Devices

Many LCNC Tools provide out-of-the-box support for mobile phone or tablets. Was that a consideration here?

So, the answer is probably, “yes” – over half the apps were developed to target mobile phones. Significantly, tablets were a target over a third of the time.

Motivation for Using LCNC App Dev Tools

We were curious what factors motivated folks to develop their own app. We asked this question a couple of ways. First, we asked for the top three factors. We then asked which of those was most important. The most important factor stacked up this way:

Approved Product List?

In corporate settings, users sometimes are restricted to choose from a list of products that have been formally evaluated and pre-approved for use. We were interested in knowing if that was the case for LCNC app development products. We asked the folks who had developed an application:

Almost half said, “yes”. It’s a bit funny that almost a third reported that they were unsure if the company maintained such a list.

Required Development Interactions and Outcome

To be successful, reports from several industry analyst groups suggest that Citizen Developers will require active support and perhaps even some level of governance from traditional IT. We wondered how much this was happening and asked a few questions along these lines.

Finally in this line of questions, we asked whether the application builder felt the project was worthwhile:

Organizational Roles

Are there clusters of roles for Business Experts within an organization?

We asked each respondent to select the part of the organization where they work and the role within that organization. Here’s a breakdown. There’s probably a more detailed analysis that we could perform here. For example, you can see that Consulting Services and IT roles appear frequently. As we include Partners in this table, that is maybe no surprise.

Project Management 



Program Manager                        4



Project Manager                        3



Other                                  3



Project Analyst                        3



Project Engineer                       2



Project Coordinator                    1



Finance and Accounting 



Other                                 13



Financial Analyst                      8



Finance Manager                        4



Accounts Receivable/Payable Clerk      3



Accountant                             1



Payroll Specialist                     1



Consulting Services



Functional Consultant                 72



Technical Consultant                  54



Project Manager                       12



Business Process Consultant           10



Other                                  9



Consulting Services Manager            7



Management Consultant                  6



Business Development Consultant        3



Business Strategy Consultant           1



Information Technology 



IT Architect                          44



IT Specialist                         42



Software Developer                    32



IT Manager                            18



Other                                 17



Systems Administrator                  7



Research and Development 



Product Developer                      3



R&D Manager                            1



Other                                  1



Sales and Marketing 



Other                                  5



Sales Manager                          3



Marketing Manager                      2



Sales Representative                   1



Procurement and Purchasing 



Procurement Analyst                    5



Procurement Manager                    3



Supply Chain Analyst                   3



Other                                  3



Human Resources 



HR Specialist                          6



Other                                  6



HR Manager                             4



Production and Manufacturing 



Other                                  8



Production Manager                     2



Manufacturing Engineer                 2



Production Worker                      1



Supply Chain and Logistics 



Other                                  9



Supply Chain Manager                   5



Logistics Manager                      2



Warehouse Supervisor                   2



Inventory Specialist                   2



Security and Compliance 



Security Manager                       1



Administrative Services 



Administrative Assistant               1



Office Manager                         1



Quality Assurance and Control 



QA/QC Manager                          1



Quality Improvement Associate          1



Other                                  1



Strategic Planning 



Management Consultant                  2



Customer Service and Support 



Support Specialist                     3



Help Desk Technician                   1

Conclusions

This is our first iteration to survey this group within SAP Community. The response rate was good – primarily driven by web site intercepts. We called out several interesting patterns in the results and there are probably opportunities for both deeper analysis of this year’s data as well as opportunities to go deeper in future surveys of this same group.

Re: Dallas Community - 12/13/23 Stammtisch

2023-12-11T14:14:09.072000+01:00

I'll be there!

Re: End of 2023 - Stammtisch at Legacy Hall

2023-12-11T14:14:39.565000+01:00

I'm planning to be there!

2024's SAP Developer Insights Survey is Ready for You

2024-01-15T05:36:44+01:00

Attention SAP Developers!

The 2024 SAP Developer Insights Survey starts today and will be running for the next six weeks. It will take about twelve minutes of your time to complete.

2024 marks the fifth consecutive year for this survey. If you design, develop, or test software for SAP applications, platforms, or data: we have questions for you.

Take the 2024 SAP Developer Insights Survey now

The information we gather in the survey is important to us. It is a key resource we use to understand who you are and what you do. These data play an important role in shaping channels, programs, and to focus new content on your needs.

We also publish the results back to you. If you are curious, have a look at the report describing last year’s survey results.

The survey period begins today, January 15th. It will continue for six weeks, ending around March 1st. Our report on this 2024 survey will be released a few weeks after that.

Help us help the SAP Community. Your contribution is important.

Re: 2024's SAP Developer Insights Survey is Ready for You

2024-01-15T15:02:31+01:00

Hi Devraj,

Thank you for taking the survey and for your kind words. It's also been interesting to analyze the results that come back -- it has helped in on numerous occasions.

Riley

Re: Shadow user in BTP

2024-04-18T21:24:26.759000+02:00

The only method I'm aware of to get "automatic user provisioning" is to utilize the create shadow user functionality. Our team has used it inside SAP to allow us to authenticate users without requiring addition of specific scopes (and the associated manual provisioning of users). In our use case, we add a middleware function to the appprouter designed to verify that the user's e-mail is associated with a specific domain - we only have to take that extra step as our IDP can source non-SAP accounts. There's probably variations to that you could apply as well.

Is there a reason you wish to avoid the create shadow user capability, though?

(and -- if it would help -- I can provide an example of the middleware function).

Re: Shadow user in BTP

2024-04-22T15:32:08.927000+02:00

tskwin,

Re: Shadow user in BTP

2024-04-22T15:56:49.322000+02:00

Hi,

I can't seem to reply directly to your comment about shadow users being discouraged, so I'll drop some comments here:

From a passage in SAP Help: "Usually, you want your administrators to be fully aware of which users they allow to log on. If you’ve switched off automatic creation of shadow users for a certain identity provider, you enforce that only those users can log on where shadow users have been created explicitly. You can create them in the SAP BTP cockpit, typically when you assign the first role collection to them."

The reasoning described there is sound, but I'd point out that there is a class of usage where the designer might not need to dole out specific scopes/roles for the majority of users. In our case, we were exposing an internal-only Docusaurus-based site -- our objective was to give the widest possible distribution while still limiting access to company employees. In such a case, we can leverage the IdP and xsuaa, to authenticate the user -- and that authentication alone is adequate to meet our security needs for such "read access".

I can't say whether that pattern would meet your application needs, though.

I need to figure out how to best package the sample code - let me point out the places where we added it and you might be able to see the solution faster than I can package the snippets.

First, we are using version 14 of approuter (specified in package.json). Probably any contemporary version of approuter will work.

In our case, the site is all static content, so we packaged it into the approuter build itself. The xs-app.json looks like this (the "build" subdirectory holds our content, but such a route could be directed almost anywhere to fit your layout):

{

"welcomeFile": "index.html",

"routes": [

{

"source": "^(.*)$",

"target": "$1",

"authenticationType": "xsuaa",

"localDir": "build"

}

]

}

The approuter.js file looks like this:

'use strict';

/// See https://help.sap.com/docs/btp/sap-business-technology-platform/extending-application-router

let userEmailCheck = require( './email-authorization-middleware' );

let approuter = require('@Sisn/approuter/approuter.js');

var approuterInstance = approuter();

approuterInstance.beforeRequestHandler.use('/',

function (req, res, next) {

return userEmailCheck(req, res, next)

});

approuterInstance.start();

The actual function is contained in "email-authorization-middleware.js")

const EMAIL_SUFFIX = "@Sisn.com";

const extendedLogging = false;

module.exports = function userEmailCheck(req, res, next) {

const domainLength = EMAIL_SUFFIX.length;

if (extendedLogging) {

console.log( "REQUEST session object: " + JSON.stringify(req.session.user));

}

var isAuthorizedEmailDomain = false;

// old session object: email in 'userId'

if (typeof req.session.user.userId !== 'undefined') {

const email = req.session.user.userId.toLowerCase();

const n = email.length;

const start = n-domainLength;

if (start >= 0) {

isAuthorizedEmailDomain = email.substr(start) == EMAIL_SUFFIX;

}

// new session object: email in 'name'

if (isAuthorizedEmailDomain == false && typeof req.session.user.name !== 'undefined') {

const name = req.session.user.name.toLowerCase();

const n = name.length;

const start = n-domainLength;

if (start >= 0) {

isAuthorizedEmailDomain = name.substr(start) == EMAIL_SUFFIX;

}

if (isAuthorizedEmailDomain) {

next();

} else {

let error = new Error("You are not authorized to access this site.");

error.status = 403;

next(error);

}

};

I apologize to the lost indentations.

Re: CAP authentication

2024-04-22T19:27:11.692000+02:00

Technically speaking, CAP typically relies on approuter/xsuaa instances to oversee authentication. That's maybe most common but that's not an absolute.

Assuming that your CAP application deployment is front-ended by approuter, you should have a look at this post by Marius Obert, I haven't used this in a while, but I expect the mechanism still works. Marius writes up an important caveat on the technique -- it will not work universally -- so read carefully.

Re: reading external (OData) API from cap

2024-04-23T16:52:17.077000+02:00

That's not a Content Type that you should get back from a successful OData API service call - hence the error.

My gut tells me that you might be getting an error during the call and that the API might be poorly implemented enough to be emitting HTML-based error messages. You might want to verify that you can call the service using something like Postman. If the call succeeds, you can verify the content type is something like "application/xml", or "text/xml" (different OData service providers will use one of several XML or JSON content types here). You can force an error, too, to expose the difference.

If this is looking like what's happening, working around it will depend upon the API that you are using to make the call.

Re: reading external (OData) API from cap

2024-04-24T21:04:52.816000+02:00

If you don't mind, please elaborate on what fixed your issue -- it will likely help others in the future.

The 2024 Developer Insights Survey: The Report

2024-04-30T03:48:33.552000+02:00

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

Position	Country
1	India	108
2	Germany	93
3	United States	29
4	Turkey	18
5	Australia	16
6	Spain	15
7	Canada	12
8	Italy	8
9	Brazil	7
10	Denmark	7
11	Mexico	7
12	Switzerland	6
13	Austria	6
14	Chile	5
15	Czech Republic	5

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.

Re: Build Full Stack Applications in SAP BTP Cloud Foundry as Multi Target Applications (MTA)

2024-05-02T21:09:49.460000+02:00

Hi there. Thanks for this post. It describes a lot of the details of adding requisite packaging and security elements for a BTP Cloud Foundry deployment.

Maybe I missed it, but there's an important element that seems to be missing for this example: anything other than public APIs should also be verifying that the requestor has proper authorization to make the call. Most often, it isn't sufficient to set up authentication/authorization at the approuter. Technically speaking the Node.js instance here will be running as a separate CF application and any requests to that application's enpoint must have authorization for the data to be truly secure.

Typically this involves passing JWT-based authorization scopes (which requires a slightly different approuter configuration of the API endpoint(s)). The Node.JS API middleware must then also inspect and validate the JWT cookie when it receives the request.

I realize that your example focuses on an existing Angular/Node app -- it's worth pointing out that CAP has facilities that make inclusion of such API authorization especially easy -- and you could still expose such APIs that via an Angular front end.

Re: Create destination service in the global account.

2024-05-02T22:30:54.900000+02:00

A BTP Global Account is basically just a container for Subaccounts. Subaccounts contain almost everything else, including Destinations.

Have you considered automation as the solution here? -- It's possible to create destinations automatically in an app deployment MTA (see Gregor Wolf's comment here: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-q-a/btp-destination-creation-using-rest-endpoints-cli/qaq-p/12572464). You might also be able to create destinations (destination service instances) via the btp CLI (https://developers.sap.com/tutorials/cp-sapcp-getstarted.html)

Re: The 2024 Developer Insights Survey: The Report

2024-05-21T16:15:31.073000+02:00

Hi @ABAPMarty , @vladimirs_semikins is right -- the BTP Developer's Guide is part of help.sap.com (link). Something we missed here or confusion we created in a tutorial? Let us know.

Re: Facing an issue with BTP CAP application deployment -...

2024-05-24T18:13:54.247000+02:00

I'd start by inspecting your project's MTA file. Does the literal 'xxxxx-metadata' appear there? If so, what service it referencing?

Re: 2024 Early Fall Stammtisch @ Legacy Hall

2024-09-11T16:21:10.132000+02:00

Be there!

Re: 2024 Early Fall Stammtisch @ Legacy Hall

2024-09-12T15:09:13.801000+02:00

It was great to see so many folks at the event yesterday! Good conversations. Thanks to all of you who were able to attend. And if you are based in the DFW area and weren't there, stay tuned.

The 2025 SAP Developer Survey is Live - Contribute Now

2025-01-23T03:52:59.925000+01:00

Attention SAP Developers!

The 2025 SAP Developer Insights Survey starts today and will be running through the first week in March. It will take about twelve minutes of your time to complete.

2025 marks the sixth consecutive year for this survey. If you design, develop, or test software for SAP applications, platforms, or data: we have questions for you.

Take the 2025 SAP Developer Survey now

As always, the survey data in anonymous. The information we gather is important to us. It is a key resource we use to understand who you are and what you do. These data play an important role in shaping channels, programs, and to focus new content on your needs.

We also publish the results back to you. If you are curious, have a look at the report describing last year’s survey results.

The survey period begins today, January 23rd. It will continue for six weeks, ending around March 7th. Our report on this 2025 survey will be released a few weeks after that.

Help us help the SAP Community. Your contribution is important.

Re: Call for Speakers (SIT DFW) - spring 2025

2025-02-14T21:57:27.175000+01:00

For my part, I'd be happy to talk on any one of a range of topics: Internal experimental use of Agents and LLMs inside SAP Community, tips on running LLMs locally, or a review of the 2025 SAP Developer Survey Results.

SAP Community - Riley Rainey

The 2023 SAP Business Experts Insights Survey: Charts, Findings, and More Charts

Introduction

Key Findings

More Background

Results and Analysis

Chart Notation Used in this Report

Respondent Demographics

Tasks Performed by Business Experts

Analytics Tool Use

Process Modeling Tool Use

Low Code / No Code Application Development

Target Devices

Motivation for Using LCNC App Dev Tools

Approved Product List?

Required Development Interactions and Outcome

Organizational Roles

Conclusions

Re: Dallas Community - 12/13/23 Stammtisch

Re: End of 2023 - Stammtisch at Legacy Hall

2024's SAP Developer Insights Survey is Ready for You

Take the 2024 SAP Developer Insights Survey now

Re: 2024's SAP Developer Insights Survey is Ready for You

Re: Shadow user in BTP

Re: Shadow user in BTP

Re: Shadow user in BTP

Re: CAP authentication

Re: reading external (OData) API from cap

Re: reading external (OData) API from cap

The 2024 Developer Insights Survey: The Report

Part I: Introduction and General Information​

Key Findings from the 2024 Survey​

General Topics​

Employment Status and Relation to SAP​

SAP Developer Community Age Distribution

​

Part II. Narrowing the Response Set​

Workplace and Trends

​

Where are the Developers?​

Development Job Roles​

Development Domains​

Recent SAP Project Experience?​

Popular Programming Languages​

Popular Programming Frameworks​

Application and Business Technology Platform Architectures​

Popular IDEs​

Potential / Use of Generative AI for Developers​

Use of Select SAP Technologies​

Developer Satisfaction with SAP​

BTP Developers Guide​

Cloud Insights​

Low / No Code Tools​

Learning and Help Resources​

Satisfaction with SAP Learning Hub​

Survey Methodology​

Other References​

Re: Build Full Stack Applications in SAP BTP Cloud Foundry as Multi Target Applications (MTA)

Re: Create destination service in the global account.

Re: The 2024 Developer Insights Survey: The Report

Re: Facing an issue with BTP CAP application deployment -...

Re: 2024 Early Fall Stammtisch @ Legacy Hall

Re: 2024 Early Fall Stammtisch @ Legacy Hall

The 2025 SAP Developer Survey is Live - Contribute Now

Take the 2025 SAP Developer Survey now

Re: Call for Speakers (SIT DFW) - spring 2025

Part I: Introduction and General Information

Key Findings from the 2024 Survey

General Topics

Employment Status and Relation to SAP

Part II. Narrowing the Response Set

Where are the Developers?

Development Job Roles

Development Domains

Recent SAP Project Experience?

Popular Programming Languages

Popular Programming Frameworks

Application and Business Technology Platform Architectures

Popular IDEs

Potential / Use of Generative AI for Developers

Use of Select SAP Technologies

Developer Satisfaction with SAP

BTP Developers Guide

Cloud Insights

Low / No Code Tools

Learning and Help Resources

Satisfaction with SAP Learning Hub

Survey Methodology

Other References