📑 Software Engineering Gaps & Challenges Survey

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Survey Description: Hi there! This academic survey aims to explore real-world challenges, friction points, and technical gaps that software engineers face in their daily development workflows. Your insights will directly help identify a concrete research gap to be addressed through novel software tooling, automation, or methodologies. This survey is completely anonymous, and the data will be used strictly for academic research. Thank you for sharing your expertise!

1. What is your current role/job title?

Backend Engineer

Frontend Engieer

Full-Stack Engineer

DevOps / SRE / Cloud Engineer

Team Lead / Software Architect

Other:

2. How many years of professional software development experience do you have?

Less than 2 year

Years 2-5

Years 5-10

More than 10 years

3. What is the primary architectural pattern of the main project you currently work on?

Monolithic Architecture

Microservices Architecture

Serverless Architecture

Event-Driven Architecture

Other / Hybrid

Other:

4. Which phase of the software development lifecycle consumes the most of your non-coding overhead or causes the most friction weekly? (Select all that apply)

Local environment setup, configuration drift, and dependency mismatches

Database management, schema migrations, and large-scale data handling

Writing, debugging, and maintaining automated tests (Unit/Integration/E2E)

Code reviews, dealing with stale Pull Requests, and merge conflicts

Observability, debugging, and troubleshooting critical issues in Production

Configuring, maintaining, or waiting on CI/CD pipelines and deployment automations

Required

5. When dealing with Legacy Codebases, what is the single biggest blocker that prevents you from performing necessary refactoring?

Outdated, missing, or completely misleading documentation

Lack of test coverage and fear of introducing breaking changes to dependent systems

Tight product deadlines and management pressure prioritizing new features over technical debt

High coupling, spaghetti code, and complex architectural dependencies

6. How satisfied are you with the current tooling ecosystem for managing, testing, and documenting APIs (e.g., Postman, Swagger) in large, collaborative team environments?

Highly Satisfied (Current tools seamlessly cover all our needs)

Partially Satisfied (They work, but lack critical automation or team synchronization features)

Dissatisfied (They introduce overhead, fragmentation, or slow down development velocity)

7. In your daily workflow, if you could completely automate or replace one specific tool or manual repetitive process, what would it be? What is the major limitation or missing feature in current market solutions that represents a true engineering gap?

8. Can you describe a recent complex technical issue (an edge case, architectural roadblock, or elusive bug) you faced where standard resources (Google, StackOverflow, or LLMs/AI assistants) failed to provide a viable solution, forcing you to engineer a custom workaround?

9. There is constant hype around new frameworks, paradigms, and dev tools. In your opinion, what is a recent technical trend or tool that actually introduces more maintenance pain, cognitive load, or complexity in production than it solves? What is the gap between its promises and reality?

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