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.