May 2016 - Committers Survey

Introduction

This survey has been 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.

Survey Catchment

Statistics were captured about the Committer status.

• The majority of respondents were active Committers
• Non of our emeritus Committers responded

Response Frequency

The survey was open for a total of 7 days (19th - 25th May 2016).

• The majority of responses were recorded during the first day
• Although the majority of responses were within the first 2 days, leaving the survey open for the additional days and sending out reminders did increase the total number of responses.
• If another survey is done, then it the default duration would be 7 days.

Survey Questions

Question 1: How long have you been an Apache OFBiz Committer?

Comments :

• The objective of this question was to find out the profile of the Committers participating in the survey
• The question was phrased specifically to identify newer Committers and more experienced ones.
• Only one response was allowed.

Conclusions :

• The project invites new Committers regularly so I would 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 have been caused by the fact we have missing data (14 out of the 38 Committers sent the survey did not respond)

Question 2: Are you a Committer on any other Apache projects?

Comments :

• The objective of this question was to find out if a Committer needed to share their time with another Apache project and so would possibly have less time available to work on the project

Conclusions :

• Only 1 of our respondents is a Committer on another project which means that the majority of our Committers are only on OFBiz
• With Groovy and Freemarker now Apache projects, and the wide use of these in OFBiz, I would have expected that some of the Committers would be shared across these two other Apache projects. Perhaps the Committers are part of these communities but not recognised as Committers on them.

Question 3: Which of the following best describes how you see yourself?

Comments :

• The objective of this question was to find out how Committers see their activity level
• It was phrased to cater for inactive or emeritus Committers but also inactive Committers who wanted to become more active

Conclusions :

• The  biggest group were the Committers that would like to contribute more frequently and there were 3 Committers that see themselves as inactive that wanted to be more active. This is a very positive finding because it means that our Committers really do want to do more for the project.
• Another positive is that one of the inactive Committers would like to be more active too. 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 (so make sure that they are included in any Committer / project communications)

Question 4: How often do you make commits to the Apache OFBiz repository?

Comments :

• The objective of this question was to get a measure of the commit activity for a Committer.
• Note that this is not a concrete measure because a Committer could still be contributing by testing, providing feedback and responses as part of another patch or commit

Conclusions :

• The majority of Committers are not commiting often.
• This could be caused by the type of work being done (e.g a re-factoring task may take longer because of the additional testing and checking that needs to be done to ensure that nothing is broken due to the re-factor), also some patches that are being applied are older which means that they may need to be fixed before they can be committed

Question 5: Which of the following best describes your commit activity?

Comments :

• The objective of this question was to find out what was the main source of a Committer's activity.
• It was phrased to cater for inactive Committers, as well as those who provided feedback and advice instead of doing regular commits

Conclusions :

• The majority of committers focus on creating and applying their own patches which is something I would have expected.
• It was very interesting to see that there is a group of committers that generally watch out for patches that contributors have uploaded and focus on testing and committing them.
• There were 5 committers that did not fit any of the answer categories whichi is significant. I think a future survey should try and capture this missing categories (or categories)

Question 6:  Do you generally contribute to areas that are relevant to your work?

Comments :

Conclusions :

Question 7:  What would make you more active as an Apache OFBiz Committer?

Comments :

The objective of this question was to find out what, if anything was stopping Committers being more active

Conclusions :

The majority of Committers chose having more spare time as the key to being more active. This in fact ties in with question 3 where the majority of Committers said that they didn't contribute as often as they would like to.

Question 8: Please respond the following statements

Comments :

Conclusions :

Question 9: What do you think would help improve the project? Please rank these in order of importance

Comments :

• The objective of this question was to find out what each Committer thought was the most important out of the selections
• The question was a ranking one, where the most important was ranked as '1' and the least at '6'
  
  

Conclusions:

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

Comments:

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

Conclusions:

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 committers

Final Comments