The Jenkins Community, the community of developers using the Jenkins CI open source continuous integration (CI) server, today announced that a recent survey showed community participants consider Jenkins to be crucial to their development processes and continue to be satisfied with Jenkins resources. The survey was conducted by CloudBees, on behalf of the Jenkins community.

In the survey of 721 development professionals, 83 percent of respondents described Jenkins CI as a mission-critical core development tool, deeply entrenched in the software development process. An overwhelming majority of respondents – 87 percent – also said they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with Jenkins, underscoring the value they are experiencing using Jenkins resources in their development initiatives.

According to metrics provided separately by the Jenkins community, growth in active installations of Jenkins CI has grown by more than 65 percent over the past year to over 53,000 installations. “The survey results drive home the point that Jenkins provides a critical service to users and that usage of it is growing rapidly,” said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, founder and member of the interim Jenkins Governing Board. “People love Jenkins, they appreciate the enhancements the Jenkins community is continually producing and they are willing to participate in, and contribute to, the project.”

One of the key strengths of Jenkins is its extensibility. Plugins to meet custom needs are easily created and, as a result, an ecosystem of 636 plugins is now available for Jenkins. Plugins exist to support the building and testing of virtually any project – ranging from enterprise Java applications to embedded C++ applications. Additionally, the number of plugins is growing by an average of one new plugin every other day. The survey showed 11 percent of respondents have created an open source plugin for the community – a high number for an open source project, reflecting the ongoing developer engagement in the Jenkins project. Another 7 percent have written an in-house plug-in to meet company-specific requirements within their own development environments, and a total of 60 percent say they’re either interested in contributing a plugin or have contributed one already.

While use of Jenkins is increasing in companies of all sizes, growth is strongest in enterprise environments. The survey showed about 69 percent growth in the number of respondents that indicated they work for companies with 1,000 developers or more (13.5 percent in 2012 vs. 8 percent in 2011).

Although Jenkins has always been well-entrenched within the Java community, with 74 percent of respondents using Java, the survey showed a significant use of other languages, too. Several popular programming languages used by developers within the community include C/C++ (38 percent), JavaScript (35 percent), Python (29 percent), C# (25 percent) and PHP (18 percent).

The online survey was launched at the Jenkins User Conference in San Francisco on September 30 and concluded on October 31, 2012. It was promoted on Jenkins-ci.org, the Jenkins Wiki, the CloudBees blog, various LinkedIn groups and other forums and social media channels.

The survey showed all types of job profiles are interested in Jenkins, with developer being listed as the most common job role (71 percent), followed by build manager (41 percent), software architect (24 percent) and DevOps professional (21 percent).

Priorities for future development expressed by the community include quality improvements and timely bug fixes, more documentation and examples, and the creation of new plugins to address specific functionality.

The survey showed Jenkins users are moving some functions to the cloud as companies increasingly realize the benefits of cloud resources for application development. Twenty-one percent are using source control management tools in the cloud, 26 percent are deploying applications to a cloud infrastructure and 13 percent are using or planning to use Jenkins in the cloud.

Learn more - get the complete survey results.

About Jenkins CI and Jenkins Community

Jenkins Continuous Integration (CI) server is an open source project developed for and by the Jenkins CI community. Jenkins CI is the leading open source CI server. Built with Java, it provides more than 600 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

By recognizing and encouraging the numerous contributors to the Jenkins CI project, the Jenkins organization creates and fosters a community-powered infrastructure for maintaining and further developing Jenkins CI. Visit www.jenkins-ci.org to find the latest news, tutorials, forums and other helpful resources for Jenkins CI users of all skill levels. You can also follow the Jenkins community on Twitter (@JenkinsCI).

Please consider making a donation to the Jenkins community. The community is currently engaged in a fundraising project for travel grants. Specifically, the grants would allow Jenkins contributors to travel, meet and strengthen their relationships with other Jenkins contributors via forums such as FOSDEM (where Kohsuke Kawaguchi will be a keynote speaker) and SCALE11x.

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