Stack Overflow Developer Survey

This repository contains the public question bank, survey flow, validation schemas, preview tooling, and historical archive for the Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey. The goal is to make the survey instrument easier to inspect, discuss, improve, and maintain over time.

You can view the current live survey preview at stackoverflow-survey-preview.netlify.app. It reflects the latest deployed copy of the survey preview from this repository.

Start here

You do not need to know GitHub, YAML, npm, or code to help shape the survey.

If you want to suggest a question, answer option, wording change, or insight for the 2026 survey, start a post in GitHub Discussions. You can write it in plain English. Comments, refinements, and upvotes on other suggestions are also helpful because they show where there is community interest or concern.

Stack Overflow reviews suggestions and community feedback, but inclusion in the final survey is at Stack Overflow's discretion. Some good ideas may not fit the survey's scope, timing, methodology, legal/privacy requirements, or need for year-over-year comparability.

Example suggestion

Title: Ask whether developers are using AI agents in production workflows

Suggestion:
Add a question about whether respondents use AI agents for production work,
experimentation, learning, or not at all.

Why this matters:
The current AI conversation often mixes casual use with production use. This
would help readers understand how widely agentic tools are actually embedded
in day-to-day professional work.

Possible answers:
- Yes, for production work
- Yes, for experiments or prototypes
- Yes, for learning or personal projects
- No, but I plan to
- No, and I do not plan to

What is in this repo?

• questions/ — YAML source files for survey questions, plus the top-level questions/survey.yaml flow definition.
• packages/survey/ — Svelte/Vite tooling for previewing the survey, validating YAML, and preparing the survey for Qualtrics.
• packages/results/ — The results site for the current survey year, built from the question bank, the year's data export, and editorial copy.
• packages/archive/ — Historical survey releases, including results data, schemas, PDFs, and static result pages.

Help shape the 2026 survey

We welcome community recommendations for questions, answer choices, wording changes, and insights the survey should be able to produce this year.

For survey content ideas, please start with GitHub Discussions rather than opening a pull request right away. A good Discussion gives the community and maintainers room to refine the idea before anyone turns it into YAML.

Useful suggestions usually include:

• The question, answer option, or insight you want the survey to capture.
• Why it matters and who would use the result.
• Whether it is new, replaces an existing question, or changes wording/options.
• Any prior art, such as related research, other surveys, or past Stack Overflow survey results.
• For changes to recurring questions, how the change affects year-over-year comparability.

Comments and upvotes on suggestions are encouraged. They help signal interest, identify unclear wording, and surface tradeoffs. They are not votes that automatically determine the final survey; Stack Overflow is responsible for the final instrument.

Use issues for bugs and PRs for focused implementation or documentation changes. See CONTRIBUTING.md for more detail.

How the survey is modeled

Questions live as individual YAML files under questions/{section}/{QuestionId}.yaml. Each file's question.id is the stable handle used for response data and cross-question references.

The survey order and branching live in questions/survey.yaml. The flow file defines blocks, pages, randomization, and if/then logic. Conditional visibility is centralized there rather than stored on individual question files.

See questions/README.md for the YAML format, option keys, validation descriptors, question type mapping, and survey flow syntax.

Local development

This project is an npm workspace. Install dependencies from the repo root:

npm install

Run the live survey preview:

npm run dev -w survey

Validate the question files and survey flow:

npm run validate -w survey

Check formatting:

npm run lint

Apply formatting:

npm run format

The survey package also includes:

npm run check -w survey
npm run build -w survey
npm run gen:types -w survey

Run the live survey result site preview:

npm run dev -w results

Process

1. Gather — Stack Overflow decides what ships, including suggestions in Discussions.
2. Author — questions/{section}/{QuestionId}.yaml, flow in questions/survey.yaml. Dropped questions move to questions/retired/ rather than being deleted, so their IDs stay claimed.
3. Check — npm run validate -w survey; npm run dev -w survey to walk the flow; npm run gen:types -w survey after a schema change.
4. Field — npm run sync:qualtrics:dry -w survey, then npm run sync:qualtrics -w survey.
5. Build — the export lands in packages/archive/<year>/json/, copy syncs with npm run content -w results, npm run dev -w results previews. On main, while the survey is in the field.
6. Publish — merging to main is what goes live, so the order matters:
   1. Merge into main with --no-ff.
   2. Cut releases/YYYY there and push the branch first — the site links to its Netlify deploy.
   3. The archive should be at releases-YYYY.questions.survey.stackoverflow.co
   4. Push main. The site is live.
7. Wind down — results.csv, schema.csv and survey.pdf land on main whenever they are ready after release; /YYYY/results.csv redirects to main, so nothing needs to be on the release branch for the download to work. Add the year's row to index.json and the archive README. Corrections keep merging into releases/YYYY until main turns to the next year.

Versioning

Feature branches merge into main as usual. Each year gets one branch — releases/YYYY — cut from main at the results release, open for corrections until main turns to the next year, and holding that year's final state from then on.

Release branches are never deleted: the results site links every question into the branch's Netlify deploy. See packages/survey.

releases/v2025-questions predates this. 2025 ran from a previous repository, so it holds only the imported question bank.

Each question carries version: 'YYYY.N' — the survey year, and a revision that resets with it. Bump N when changing a question that has already shipped; authoring edits do not count. IDs freeze at the same point, so a change that breaks comparison with earlier answers gets a new ID instead.

Why open the survey instrument?

The survey is fielded primarily through Stack Overflow's own channels, which means the respondent pool is self-selecting and weighted toward already-engaged users. Opening the instrument helps the community review and improve it before fielding.

This is especially useful for:

• Flagging ambiguous or leading wording.
• Identifying missing answer choices.
• Surfacing geographic, cultural, or professional blind spots.
• Preserving longitudinal comparability when questions change.
• Making methodology and survey structure easier to audit.

License and data attribution

Data is published under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0; individual cell contents are published under the Database Contents License (DbCL) 1.0.

In summary, you are free to share, create, and adapt the database as long as you attribute it, preserve the license notice, share adapted databases under the ODbL, and keep redistributed database versions open.

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Unless otherwise stated, the contents of this repository are licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the Apache License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

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