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Introduction

This survey has been was designed to collect information and feedback from all Apache OFBiz Committers.It was sent out to all Committers, including non active and emeritus (a total of 38). The information gathered will be used to help understand if there are any areas where help and support is needed, and also to give Committers an opportunity to highlight any points they see as important that may not have yet come up for discussion on the mailing lists.

Survey Details:

• It was conducted over the period 19th - 25th May 2016. Details of the survey was posted on the mailing lists.
• A total of 24 responses were recorded and the details are recorded below.

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• The project invites new Committers regularly so I would have expected that the numbers would be fairly balanced across each duration but this is not the case.
• This question has highlighted that there is we have a lot of new and experienced Committers but not many in between.
• This discrepancy could also have been caused by the fact we have missing data (14 out of the 38 Committers sent the survey did not respond)

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• The results show that only 1 of our respondents is a Committer on another Apache project and the majority are only Committers only on OFBiz
• With Groovy and Freemarker now Apache projects, I would have expected that some of the Committers would be shared across these two other Apache projects.
• Perhaps a future question could capture if Committers are contributors (rather than Committers) on another Apache project

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Conclusions :

• The results show that the  the biggest group were the Committers that would like to contribute more frequently.
• One unexpected result was that there 3 Committers that see themselves as currently inactive that wanted to be more active. (Note: This included committers that are currently classed as active as well as inactive)
• A positive finding is that one of the inactive Committers would like to be more active. This means that even though Committers have not been involved in the project for a while, they may still want to be able to come back and contribute.
• The use of the 'None of the above' category shows that there was an answer choice missing so maybe this can be discovered in the discussions resulting from the survey.

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• The objective of this question was to find out what each Committer thought was the most important out of the selections
• 6 responses were allowed (one for each ranking)
• The question was a ranking one, where the most important was ranked as '1' and the least at '6'.
• Weighting Calculation = Total Weighting / Total
  
  • A weight of 6 was put on anything ranked 1
  • A weight of 5 was put on anything ranked 2
  • A weight of 4 was put on anything ranked 3
  • A weight of 3 was put on anything ranked 4
  • A weight of 2 was put on anything ranked 5
  • A weight of 1 was put on anything ranked 6
    
    

ConclusionsConclusions:

• Although Improving quality by tidying up the existing codebase was ranked first the most, it shared first position with Better documentation because of the averaging calculation. Better documentation was ranked second the most.
• It's interesting to see that having a more structured workplan is in second position because in a question 7 Committers  responded that having a define workplan would not make them more active. The response here seems to indicate that the visibility wanted may not be individual but at a project level so that people have a clearer view of what is happening and how it is all linked together.

• Keeping up to date with trends and technology is in third position. This seems to indicate that as the project progresses, the respondents think that we need to be aware of what is happening technologically and incorporate what we can to keep OFBiz up to date.
• Separating the framework into a distinct product is in fourth position. The community has previously discussed this option and it's interesting to see that some respondents think that it could be a good improvement for the project. With the current effort in re-factoring the framework, this idea could become more and more popular.
• Having more Committers is in the lowest position. This is an interesting result because normally if there is a problem of workload, the simple answer is to allocate more people to work on it which seems to indicate that the main improvements that respondents see are to do with how we are working (what our focus is and how we plan and manage doing what we do) rather than the amount of work that needs to be done.

Question Question 10: Would you be willing to participate in future OFBiz Committer surveys?

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Comments:

• The objective of this question was to find out what the Committers would be willing to take part in future surveys.
• Only one response was allowed

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• Normally this type of question gives only 2 options (Yes / No). I added the additional option to give more choice, especially if a non active or emeritus committersemeritus Committers
• The majority of Committers are happy to participate in future surveys.

Final Comments

Please note that participation in this survey was completely voluntary. None of our Committers were under any obligation to respond to the survey. I'm happy that a majority of them did and that we were able to capture this valuable information..

Thank you to everyone who completed the survey that enabled me to provide these results and details. I hope that these are useful to the community now and into the future as we continue to look and survey our community base.

Please feel to leave any comments or observations.