DZone Community Research

DZone's annual community survey captures how software professionals are building, learning, and making decisions — and what's changing as AI becomes a practical layer across coding, documentation, and delivery workflows.

The 2026 report is based on the 2025 DZone Community Survey dataset collected Dec. 9, 2025, through Jan. 27, 2026.

Our analysis includes:

• DZone's community overview

  Experience levels, roles, company context, and technology purchase influence, with key segment cuts (experience, company size, role group, purchase influence).

• Relationship with DZone

  Visit frequency, motivations, content format preferences, and satisfaction signals that shape how the community uses DZone.

• What's in the stack

  What respondents are building, and the languages, ecosystems, platforms, tools, and IDEs supporting day-to-day delivery.

• AI in development workflows

  Adoption, where respondents said AI helped, and which technologies they expected to have the most impact in 2026.

• Platform engineering and internal developer platforms

  Usage, who's adopting, what it's improving, and how it relates to AI adoption.

• Professional development and learning

  Where developers go to learn and what they want to learn next, with implications for content strategy and enablement.

• Open-ended insights

  Theme-based analysis and curated anonymized quotes reflecting what respondents wanted more (and less) of.

• Year-over-year highlights (2024 vs. 2025)

  Directional comparisons across adoption, audience mix, engagement, and purchase influence.

• Implications

  What the results suggested for the DZone community, editorial strategy, and partners.

These pages will consist of audience data and engagement metrics, year-over-year (YOY) comparisons, language and tool preferences, and preferred learning formats. Our goal is simple: to provide our global developer audience with insightful data about their own communities and industries. This data will allow the wider DZone audience to educate themselves and others throughout their individual career and professional development journeys.