A Survey of Software Engineering Practices in Turkey (extended version)

Context: Understanding the types of software engineering practices and techniques used in the industry is important. There is a wide spectrum in terms of the types and maturity of software engineering practices conducted in each software team and company. To characterize the type of software engineering practices conducted in software firms, a variety of surveys have been conducted in different countries and regions. Turkey has a vibrant software industry and it is important to characterize and understand the state of software engineering practices in this industry. Objective: Our objective is to characterize and grasp a high-level view on type of software engineering practices in the Turkish software industry. Among the software engineering practices that we have surveyed in this study are the followings: software requirements, design, development, testing, maintenance, configuration management, release planning and support practices. The current survey is the most comprehensive of its type ever conducted in the context of Turkish software industry. Method: To achieve the above objective, we systematically designed an online survey with 46 questions based on our past experience in the Canadian and Turkish contexts and using the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). 202 practicing software engineers from the Turkish software industry participated in the survey. We analyze and report in this paper the results of the questions. Whenever possible, we also compare the trends and results of our survey with the results of a similar 2010 survey conducted in the Canadian software industry. Results: The survey results reveal important and interesting findings about software engineering practices in Turkey. Among the findings are the followings: (1) The software industries of the military and defense domains are quite strong in Turkey, especially in Ankara, and many SE practitioners work for those firms. (2) In terms of types of software developed in the companies, the top categories are: business applications software, safety-critical and mission-critical software, and web applications, (3) 54% of the participants reported not using any software size measurement methods, whereas 33% mentioned that they have measured lines of code (LOC) and 15% used usecase points, (4) development phase is the phase where teams spend the most effort on (with an average of 31%), (5) After the development phase, software testing, requirements, design and maintenance phases come next and have similar average values (14%, 12%, 12% and 11% respectively), (6) respondents experience the most challenge in the requirements phase, (7) Waterfall, as a rather old but still widely used lifecycle model, is the model that more than half of the respondents (53%) use. The next most preferred lifecycle models are incremental and Agile/lean development models with usage rates of 38% and 34%, respectively, (8) Around 45% of the respondents from larger companies operate in the military and defense sector. Majority of the respondents from smaller companies are in engineering, manufacturing, IT and telecommunication sectors, and (9) The Waterfall and Agile methodologies have slight negative correlations, denoting that if one is used in a firm, the other will less likely to be used. Conclusion: The results of our survey will be of interest to software engineering professionals both in Turkey and world-wide. It will also benefit researchers in observing the latest trends in software engineering industry identifying the areas of strength and weakness, which would then hopefully encourage further industry-academia collaborations in those areas.