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+---
+layout: blogpost
+title: "HIFIS Survey 2020: Programming, CI and VCS"
+data: 2020-11-27
+authors:
+ - erxleben
+title_image: coding_background.jpg
+categories:
+ - report
+---
+
+## Introduction
+In the beginning of 2020 the HIFIS team conducted a survey among Helmholtz
+scientists with the goals of learning more about the current practices
+concerning research software development and identifying future challenges.
+
+This blog post will present a glimpse into the survey's results and our take
+on the gathered data.
+Specifically, we will take a look at the distribution of programming languages
+across the different research fields as well as the utilization of
+_Version Control Systems_ (VCS) in the same context.
+Last, a short insight into the prevalence of various
+_Continuous Integration_ (CI) systems will be given to round out this blog
+post.
+
+## Programming Languages
+
+We asked the survey participants which programming languages they regularly
+used for writing research software.
+The following heatmap displays the relative usage of the most predominant programming languages for each research field
+
+{:.treat-as-figure}
+
+
+All presented numbers are the relative usage of a given language in a given
+field.
+They might not always add up to exactly 1.00 per field or per language due to
+multiple factors:
+
+* Some participants did not answer both questions.
+ These answers are not represented in the plot.
+* Languages that had not at least a _5%_ share in at least one field were
+ omitted to focus on the most prominent ones and make the graphic easier to
+ read.
+
+### What can We Learn?
+
+The first thing that catches the eye is that Python seems to be very dominant
+in every research field.
+We have to take this appearance with a slight grain of salt since the survey did
+not distinguish between the outdated, but generally popular, Python 2 and
+the current Python 3.
+The popularity of the language amongst researchers is not very surprising:
+They are well suited for quickly creating small scale scripts, combined with
+an extensive choice of libraries for many use cases.
+
+Consequently, our education and training efforts will continue to provide
+offers regarding programming in Python and create appropriate courses and
+materials to further the knowledge and best practices in this language amongst
+scientists and research software developers.
+
+Regarding consultations we expect the team to receive requests regarding the
+porting of older Python 2 applications to Python 3, as well as support
+requests for dealing with the variance of virtual environments and package
+management for this language.
+
+A second language often selected was C++ which often is a popular choice in
+high performance computing and larger applications.
+
+This indicates a potential demand for supporting this language in the future as
+well, especially in the context of training as well as consulting.
+
+Notable further mentions would be the the strong presence of the statistics
+language R in the _Health_ and _Earth and Environment_ research fields,
+which implies the opportunity for education and consulting being tailored and
+advertised more towards these areas.
+
+## Version Control systems
+
+Similarly to the question above, a second question was analyzed, concerning the
+usage of _Version Control Systems_ (VCS) amongst the participants related to
+specific fields of research.
+
+{:.treat-as-figure}
+
+
+The strong prevalence of Git is apparent at first glance.
+As a runner-up there are still some projects out there based on SVN for
+version control, which - together with a few mentions of CVS - might be an
+indicator for older, longer living projects.
+The amount of projects not using any version control at all is comparatively
+low, which points toward the usage of VCS being an established step in setting
+up projects across all research fields.
+
+From an education perspective it appears to be the right way to continue to
+focus on basic and advanced Git-courses and promote version control as one of
+the standard practices in every scientists toolbox.
+It can be expected that the consulting team might face requests for help with
+migrating projects from SVN or CVS to Git in the future.
+
+## Continuous Integration
+
+As a third question we wanted to know which _Continuous Integration_ (CI)
+services the participants use to automate tasks surrounding their projects.
+This, again, was a multiple choice question and the following plot shows the
+relative distribution of the given answers:
+
+{:.treat-as-figure}
+
+
+One very prominent outcome is that over half of the participants did claim to
+not use any CI at all.
+Several possible reasons for this finding come to mind:
+* The question was not clear enough and participants who actually use CI were
+ not aware of that fact.
+* Participants are not aware that CI exists.
+* Participants do not see any potential benefit of CI for their projects.
+* Participants do not know how to set up and use CI.
+
+Given that practically any project can benefit from employing
+_Continuous Integration_ services by automating at least the mundane management
+tasks like license checking, documentation generation, style checks, etc. all
+four given reasons can be assumed to be a lack in awareness and education.
+
+Further, the plot reveals that the currently used CI solutions are (in
+descending order of percentage) _GitLab CI_ which holds over a quarter of all
+shares, _Jenkins_ and _Travis CI_ with all other services being barely
+represented.
+
+Building on the insights from this analysis, three actions clearly stand out to
+improve CI usage across all projects:
+* The education team will have to increase their portfolio and offer more
+ courses centered around CI usage.
+* The popularity of _GitLab CI_ will likely increase the demand to migrate
+ other projects to this system. It will fall to the consulting branch to be
+ prepared to deal with such requests.
+* The technology team has already begun to offer pre-made recipes for CI
+ pipelines and has an incentive to grow the collection of ready-to-use solutions
+ for popular scenarios.
+
+Further insights on the usage of Continuous Integration platforms can be
+gained from another
+[blog post]({% post_url 2020/11/2020-11-27-survey-technology %})
+discussing the survey analysis from a technology perspective.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+Thanks to the participants of the HIFIS survey in 2020 it was possible to gain
+a first glimpse into the status quo of research software engineering within the
+Helmholtz centers. With this data, the needs of the scientists could be assessed
+from a birds-eye perspective and it is possible to determine concrete steps to
+offer better support for the scientists at Helmholtz.
+
+
diff --git a/_posts/2020/11/2020-11-27-survey-technology.md b/_posts/2020/11/2020-11-27-survey-technology.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..38c6ab37469dc8d4a59face8d17573bf440b23f7
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+---
+title: "HIFIS Survey 2020: A Technology Perspective"
+data: 2020-11-27
+authors:
+ - huste
+ - hueser
+layout: blogpost
+title_image: coding_background.jpg
+categories:
+ - report
+tags:
+ - survey
+ - technology
+excerpt: >
+ The HIFIS Software survey gathered information from Helmholtz
+ research groups about their development practice. This post shows some
+ insights from a technology perspective and tries to make some conclusions
+ for the future direction of HIFIS Software technology services.
+---
+
+Beginning of 2020 the HIFIS Software team initiated a software survey
+targeting employees of the whole Helmholtz Association in which 467 participants
+could be considered for the analysis.
+The figure below depicts how strongly the different Helmholtz research fields
+are represented in this survey.
+
+{:.treat-as-figure}
+
+
+With the results of the survey we want to understand, how we as HIFIS Software
+Services can best support your every day life as a research software developer.
+In this blog post we will examine the results from a technology perspective
+and will on the one hand give an overview of the status quo of the software
+engineering process of the participants, and on the other hand try to identify
+specific measures.
+
+## Version Control
+
+One of the basic requirements for developing sustainable and high-quality
+research software is the usage of a version control system (VCS).
+On the market there exist multiple competitors, distributed version control
+systems like Git or Mercurial and centralized version control systems like
+SVN.
+In accordance with the trends shown in analysis done by Stackoverflow, we
+expected Git to be the most popular tool within Helmholtz.
+
+{:.treat-as-figure}
+
+Trend of Stackoverflow questions per month. Created via [Stackoverflow Trends](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends)
+on 2020-10-15.
+
+The participants of the survey have answered to the multiple-choice question
+about which VCSs they use as shown in the figure below.
+
+{:.treat-as-figure}
+
+
+A similar diagram as above has already been evaluated in a related
+[blog post on results from the survey analysis]({% post_url 2020/11/2020-11-27-survey-results-language-vcs %}).
+Here, based on these descriptions we only would like to draw conclusions
+from a technological point of view.
+Only roughly 10% of the participants claim that they do not use VCSs
+while developing their research software.
+These results indicate that the awareness is high among the participants
+that the usage of version control systems is an important aspect in
+sustainable software development.
+
+In order to unravel that a bit more, we identified a trend in the figure below
+that the use of VCSs increase the wider research software developers share
+their source code in terms of categories like within their research group,
+research organization, research field or even general public.
+Hence, there might be a relationship between the broadness of code
+share and usage of VCSs.
+If this trend holds true then it illustrates that version control
+systems are indeed mandatory tools to collaborate with other
+developers.
+
+{:.treat-as-figure}
+
+
+The responses to the survey are then grouped into the six Helmholtz research
+fields:
+
+* Aeronautics, Space and Transport
+* Energy
+* Earth and Environment
+* Health
+* Matter
+* Key Technologies
+
+{:.treat-as-figure}
+
+
+In the research field _Aeronautics, Space and Transport_ SVN seems to be
+more widely spread compared to other research fields but also the portion
+of developers who do not use version control is lowest among the
+participants of this research field.
+On the one hand, given the collected data about the amount of VCSs questions
+asked on Stackoverflow over time introduced earlier this most probably gives an
+indication that there is a significant amount of comparably older repositories
+that use SVN and that this research field might have a longer tradition of
+using VCSs.
+On the other hand, this shows that the use of VCSs in this research
+field today is more prevalent compared to other Helmholtz research fields.
+
+From the data it is also possible to compare the usage of version control
+systems with the team size participants usually develop software in.
+The result is shown in the figure below:
+
+{:.treat-as-figure}
+
+
+It is clearly visible that the amount of participants who claim to not use any
+kind of version control decreases with increasing team size.
+This insight is actually very valuable.
+This illustration suggests a relationship between team size and the use of VCSs.
+One reason for increasing use of VCSs with growing team size might be that VCSs
+make collaboration more comfortable and that researchers are aware of this fact.
+Whether the use of VCSs has actually already become a de-facto standard in
+research software will be further investigated (e.g. in our next survey).
+
+On the other hand from the participants who claim to develop software mostly
+on their own 20% specify to not use version control at all.
+This is something we as HIFIS Software Services would like to see change in
+the future.
+For us, it is important to make people aware that using version control is a
+mandatory requirement for software development projects of any scale.
+This requires us to make the entry hurdle to using version control systems as
+low as possible.
+This means that every software developer in Helmholtz must have
+access to a suitable and easy-to-use infrastructure to enable this basic
+requirement.
+Therefore, HIFIS Software Services will offer a GitLab instance that is
+usable by every employee of the Helmholtz Association free of charge.
+
+## Software Development Platforms
+
+Using version control systems can be considered the entry-point to a world of
+platforms that build even more around this basic requirement.
+Even if you can typically use a version control system completely local
+as well, it really starts paying off when combining version control with online
+platforms like e.g. GitLab, GitHub or Bitbucket.
+On the one hand this opens up your project for collaboration but also gives
+you access to a whole ecosystem of other extremely useful tools like issue
+tracking, merge requests, CI/CD or code reviews.
+This is why we were also eager to know which software development platforms
+the participants use in their every-day life.
+
+{:.treat-as-figure}
+
+
+The results show that among the participants the most widely used platforms
+are GitHub.com and self-hosted GitLab instances followed by GitLab.com.
+Thus, about 54% of the participants claim to use GitHub.com, 49% use self-hosted
+GitLab instances and about 25% of the participants specify to use GitLab.com.
+About 13% claim to not use any of the platforms.
+This value is in a similar range to the participants who specified to not use
+version control systems.
+
+## Continuous Integration
+
+Continuous Integration (CI) is referred to as the practice of merging code
+changes into a shared mainline several times a day.
+A typical workflow would incorporate the automatic building of a software,
+the automatic execution of unit tests and finally, the automatic deployment of
+artifacts, e.g the documentation or compiled binaries.
+The last step is also referred to as Continuous Deployment (CD).
+On the market, there exist multiple tools that support this kind of software
+development process.
+Some of the tools available at the time of this survey were GitLab CI, Jenkins,
+Travis or CircleCI.
+
+The results of the survey show a pretty diverse situation for the usage of CI
+services by the participants.
+
+{:.treat-as-figure}
+
+
+On the one hand, a portion of 53% of the participants claim to not use CI
+services at all.
+Among the participants who declared to use CI services, the most commonly used
+technologies were GitLab CI (29%), Jenkins (16%) and Travis CI (13%).
+Due to the fact that many Helmholtz centers host their own GitLab instances
+which also allows to use GitLab CI, we expected GitLab CI to be the most
+popular tool among the participants of the survey.
+Jenkins is also a tool that can be self-hosted and thus, is also popular and
+available in different centers.
+Due to the popularity of GitHub, especially for Open Source projects,
+it is not surprising that also Travis CI is widely chosen according
+to the survey responses.
+At the time of creating the survey, GitHub Actions was not yet widely available
+on the market.
+This explains, why this service does not show up in the list of chosen tools.
+
+We as HIFIS Software Services would like to see a rise in the overall usage
+of CI/CD in the daily software development process.
+It offers the chance to automate repeating tasks and introduces automated
+quality checks for code changes before they get merged into the mainline.
+Therefore, we want to ensure that every Helmholtz researcher regardless of
+their affiliation has seamless access to general purpose resources for CI/CD.
+This is why the provided GitLab instance will be equipped with scalable
+resources for CI/CD.
+With this offer, in combination with proper education, training and
+consultation we hope to see a rise of the general usage of automation
+technologies in research software engineering.