Talk:Developer Satisfaction Survey

Survey is too hard to answer

I started trying to fill in this year's survey and gave up, because it's too hard to answer the questions in a meaningful way. For example:

• It asks me what my volunteer role is and gives a list of things which mostly sound like job titles, but I don't work for Wikimedia and they don't mean anything to me. I don't have a role, I just do things.
• It asks how long I've been involved and requires me to give an exact number of years. I don't know the answer to that level of precision and requiring me to be more precise than I can be means you will get bad data.
• It requires me to answer "How satisfied are you with the time it takes to onboard new contributors onto setting up a personal development environment?" even though I have not tried to do that.
• For "In the past year, have you used any shared test environments (i.e., beta cluster or patch demo)?" I have to select "I'm not sure" instead of "No" in order to to be able to say "Very dissatisfied" for "How satisfied are you with your ability to test your code in a shared environment before merge?" - I haven't used a shared test environment because I don't know of any I can use (Patch demo is missing too many extensions, I don't know how to use the beta cluster to test things) and I'm very dissatisfied because I want to be able to let people test things before I start a code review in Gerrit.

(I gave up at that point, so I can't comment on any later questions)

- Nikki (talk) 13:43, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Hi, sorry for the late reply here—I'm very interested in refining the survey year-over-year based on feedback like this.

In particular, I'm interested in your comments about "volunteer role."

I don't have a role, I just do things.

I agree that the volunteer roles currently sound like job titles, which is bad.

I'm very open to suggestions to improve these groups.

I'd still like to keep the roles (somehow). Ideally, roles would help us figure out what folks are trying to do and let us see where some of our tools are unfit for that job. You brought up Patch Demo and I think that's a good example—for some users, Patch Demo has all the extensions they need—is there some common thing folks not served by Patch Demo are trying to do and do we have a way to talk about that group of users? It would be interesting to know, for example, that volunteers who identify as extension developers are dissatisfied with patchdemo, that gives us a starting point for change. If we can get that information AND make the roles question feel natural to answer: that'd be the ideal. TCipriani (WMF) (talk) 17:34, 29 April 2024 (UTC)