The results of the ‘SonarQube 2014 unofficial survey’ are available: http://onlysoftware.wordpress.com/2014/02/03/sonarqube-2014-unofficial-survey-results/

Its author, Patroklos Papapetrou, is a distinguished software gardener and a highly competent SonarQubist, co-author of the bible « SonarQube In Action ».

As I noticed significant differences with the data I get from my blog, especially in the geographical origin of participants in this survey, I decided to make some statistics about Qualilogy’s visitors for the year 2013.

I pretty much know these trends because I’m monitoring regularly these figures, but I had not made a summary about the whole year. This will be the subject of this post.

It should be noted that the data below come from Google Analytics, and as such may not be very accurate because Google takes into account the visits from browsers with JavaScript enabled. This is in order to avoid counting of ‘non-human hits’ performed by search engines, spam tools, etc. It’s incredible the number of comments on my blog from people who want to sell pills. If only we could get a bigger code quality or loose Technical Fatness with just pills.

However, even if these figures are not completely accurate, and probably even a little undervalued, we just are interested in orders of magnitude or trend, not on precise numbers.

Geographic distribution

From January 1st to December 31st of 2013, 38,128 unique people visited (in one or several times) 71,936 pages. The geographical breakdown by country for the first 20 of them, is:

The top 20 countries is representing 30,555 unique visitors, 80% of the whole attendance. The top 10 below constitutes 2/3 of them:

We can see that France, India and United States are the three leading countries, far ahead of Spain. In the ‘unofficial’ SonarQube survey, India and Spain are pretty in minority, while Germany and UK are rather well represented.

Regarding Qualilogy, Germany is behind Spain and UK is behind Mexico. Brazil, Colombia and Chile close the list of the top 10. Latin America is therefore a significant part of the attendance of Qualilogy, as these countries represent 20% of visits.

Of course, the fact that my posts are also available in Spanish facilitates these contacts from the South American continent, but I can tell you that the progress is quite important since 2011, as well as that of India also. So I think we mostly see the result of the significant expansion of SonarQube outside its original franco- anglo-swiss area. By the way, Switzerland is in 19th position, between Belgium and Italy. A bit like on the map, no?

Abap & Cobol

J2EE is over-represented in the SonarQube unofficial survey, and ABAP and Cobol languages present very small numbers. As some sections of my blog are devoted to these ‘Legacy’ technologies, I did some calculations. They are based on pages that have received at least 10 visits in 2013 in order to set aside some less relevant results (visits to archive pages, comments, pages of searches on the site, etc. ). The results are 400 pages representing nearly 60 000 visits:

Topic	Visits	%
Abap	8 038	14%
Cobol	3 920	7%
Sonar	36 492	61%
Other	11 036	19%
Total	59 486	100%

The category ‘Sonar’ consists of all pages that discuss SonarQube, primarily around technical questions related to the installation, upgrade, configuration or customization (Quality Profiles for example), the realization of analysis, etc.

This topic ‘Sonar’ attracts more than 60% of the visits, but we note that the pages ‘Abap’ and ‘Cobol’ represent more visits than all other pages (‘Other’). These last ones deal with various issues around application quality, use cases or even posts on ‘solopreneurs’ or Qualilogy. In addition, I have not written articles on Cobol analysis in 2013, and very little on ABAP, so these visits are about posts prior to 2013, while the pages for ‘Sonar’ or ‘Other’ have been published throughout the year and therefore logically accumulate more visits.

What is interesting is that the distribution of these topics ‘Abap’ and ‘Cobol’ is exactly the same in the three languages: english, french and spanish. Indeed, I write each post in one of three blogs:

• /en for english articles,
• /es for spanish articles,
• /fr for French articles.

We note that 57% of the visits to the pages ‘Cobol’ and 58% of those on pages ‘Abap’ come from the english blog, between 28% and 31% on the spanish blog and between 11% and 15 % for the french one.

This is an old country, France, in an old continent, Europe, which has been overtaken by younger nations.

Okay, seriously, it is normal that the English blog focuses more visits, especially with the USA and India. And although it may seem surprising to see the Spanish blog before the French blog, I think that again, a great part of the traffic consists of visitors from Latin America.

The distribution is the same for ‘Other’ pages. However, English is over-represented on the ‘Sonar’ pages, but this can be explained by the fact that many of them are actually quite technical, and we mainly use softwares in English. When it comes to install Oracle or Tomcat, I prefer a documentation or a manual in the language of the software installation.

In total , the English blog gets 2/3 of the visits, but the Spanish blog represents more than half of the rest. So in summary:

• India and the United States are shoulder to shoulder with France.
• Latin America represents one visit on five, not counting those of Spain.
• This puts the Spanish blog in second place before the French one.
• Finally, Abap and Cobol pages also attract one visit on five. Not bad for old technos.

I think I shall see with Patroklos to publish its survey on my blog next time. This should give more even more interesting results.

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