Topic on Talk:Developer Satisfaction Survey/2021/Importance vs satisfaction

Awesome survey :)

Just wanted to point out that given that this survey is about the existent tools and how important are they, instead of about the needs, and how much you need them satisfied, the importance statistic might be a bit misleading.

For example, if I would have a really great and easy way to start a beta deployment to test, or a very well polished deployment that finds any errors before they cause errors, maybe the CI would not be so important (as the need is to actually avoid bugs in prod).

Similar for code reviews and CI, a really good and well polished CI can do wonders to improve code reviews (and the other way around actually).

On the other side, if some tool is so not easy to use, or not fit for the purpose that you end up using a different tool to fill the need, that tool will lose importance to the replacement, even though it's the one meant to fit that need.

Point being that if all you have is a hammer, that hammer becomes extremely important even if what you are trying to do is to chop veggies (though your satisfaction would probably not be really high).

+100: This is an important point. This applies to "Beta", too! It's less important to people because it doesn't solve their problems.

The IPA chart was a good way to point at categories that deserve more attention. So we could ask: what could be done to make this IPA score better?

I think the comments on the survey pointed to the need for better development environments generally rather than a need for a specific environment. In a world with better development environments: maybe beta is even more irrelevant and maybe CI's importance goes down. Many categories are connected.

Its now the task to find what problems each development environment—CI, Local development, beta—solve and try to solve them better. Possibly by focusing on a new environment or reinvesting in an existing one.