Decoding the Diversity of the German Software Developer Community: Insights from an Exploratory Cluster Analysis

To better understand the nature of the software developer community in Germany, an open data set of 2,837 responses collected through the Stack Overflow Developer Survey was analyzed. Cluster analysis identified four sub-groups that were characterized by significant differences in sociodemographic variables, programming experience and software development specialization: the web developer (25%), the junior developer (26%), the senior developer (39%), and the research developer (10%). Cluster characteristics were associated with differences in experienced community membership, frequency of Stack Overflow visits and participation in Q &A. Senior developers with the highest level of coding experience reported the overall strongest community engagement, while research developers visited Stack Overflow least often. A positive moderate relationship between community membership and community visits and community participation provided additional evidence for the importance of the sense of (virtual) community as a psychological driving factor of community engagement. Together, these findings can contribute to developing more targeted training and community-building measures.