State of Code Quality 2016: Trends & Insights into Dev Collaboration
May 09, 2016

Justin Collier
SmartBear Software

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that software quality is a top concern for organizations of all shapes and sizes. But heavy workloads, time constraints and lack of manpower plague many organizations. Despite the obstacles, however, with the right tools and best practices, teams can successfully and consistently peer review all code – leading to higher quality software in less time and at a reduced cost.

According to survey respondents in SmartBear Software's new report State of Code Quality 2016: Trends & Insights into Dev Collaboration, code review is looked at as the number one way to improve code quality.

However, ad-hoc or “over the shoulder” code review is the most commonly used type of code review within organizations with nearly three-quarters of respondents participating in ad-hoc reviews throughout the year.

Half of respondents are doing meeting based code review with 37 percent doing it as least once a month.

63 percent are doing tool-based code review with only 23 percent doing it on a daily basis.

Aside from code review, unit testing is considered to be the next most critical method for improving code quality.

Methodology: SmartBear surveyed 600 software developers, testers, IT/operations professionals and business leaders representing more than 30 different industries. The global online survey was conducted during December 2015. Participants in the survey work on software teams ranging from less than five employees up to more than 50 employees, and work for companies ranging from small businesses with less than 25 employees, to enterprise organizations with 10,000 employees or more.

Justin Collier is a Product Owner at SmartBear Software
Share this

Industry News

April 14, 2025

LambdaTest announced the launch of the HyperExecute MCP Server, an enhancement to its AI-native test orchestration platform, HyperExecute.

April 14, 2025

Cloudflare announced Workers VPC and Workers VPC Private Link, new solutions that enable developers to build secure, global cross-cloud applications on Cloudflare Workers.

April 14, 2025

Nutrient announced a significant expansion of its cloud-based services, as well as a series of updates to its SDK products, aimed at enhancing the developer experience by allowing developers to build, scale, and innovate with less friction.

April 10, 2025

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) announced that its Infinity Platform has been named the top-ranked AI-powered cyber security platform in the 2025 Miercom Assessment.

April 10, 2025

Orca Security announced the Orca Bitbucket App, a cloud-native seamless integration for scanning Bitbucket Repositories.

April 10, 2025

The Live API for Gemini models is now in Preview, enabling developers to start building and testing more robust, scalable applications with significantly higher rate limits.

April 09, 2025

Backslash Security(link is external) announced significant adoption of the Backslash App Graph, the industry’s first dynamic digital twin for application code.

April 09, 2025

SmartBear launched API Hub for Test, a new capability within the company’s API Hub, powered by Swagger.

April 09, 2025

Akamai Technologies introduced App & API Protector Hybrid.

April 09, 2025

Veracode has been granted a United States patent for its generative artificial intelligence security tool, Veracode Fix.

April 09, 2025

Zesty announced that its automated Kubernetes optimization platform, Kompass, now includes full pod scaling capabilities, with the addition of Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) alongside the existing Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA).

April 08, 2025

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) has emerged as a leading player in Attack Surface Management (ASM) with its acquisition of Cyberint, as highlighted in the recent GigaOm Radar report.

April 08, 2025

GitHub announced the general availability of security campaigns with Copilot Autofix to help security and developer teams rapidly reduce security debt across their entire codebase.

April 08, 2025

DX and Spotify announced a partnership to help engineering organizations achieve higher returns on investment and business impact from their Spotify Portal for Backstage implementation.

April 07, 2025

Appfire announced its launch of the Appfire Cloud Advantage Alliance.