[llvm-dev] GitHub Survey?

[Renato Golin via llvm-dev]

On 9 September 2016 at 20:53, Chris Bieneman <cbieneman at apple.com> wrote:
> There is a difference between asking “How much does this impact you?” verses getting data on what about it causes impact. For example someone who thinks a transition will greatly impact them but also is already using git may have specific interesting concerns.

Indeed, I think we can elaborate on the description of the text areas.


> Where I think the current survey is lacking is the ability to differentiate uses from contributions. Probably the only thing we need to add to the survey to cover this is either a clear statement that the email provided should be the email tied to their SVN account, or a request for SVN username if the person has commit access.

There is a question on what kind of contribution you have (core dev,
user, interested party, etc).


> As I’ve said in the past analyzing data from free text fields will be unwieldy. By my count, we had 473 contributors across clang, clang-tools-extra, compiler-rt, libcxx, libcxxabi, libunwind, lld, lldb, and llvm in the last year*. In an ideal world we’d get 100% response to the survey plus additional responses from downstream users who aren’t contributors. Analyzing free-text fields for hundreds of respondents to get data that could come from very simple questions seems less than ideal.

We also have non-committers that work on LLVM every day, and some of
those people's work is probably even more relevant (infrastructure,
release, products, validation, development environment, etc). However,
I don't expect to get 473 responses, but something between 100 and
200, which already would be fantastic.


> All that aside, none of this may matter. It largely depends on who is making the decision and how they are making the decision. It might be nice to get some consensus around that as a starting point.

True, but we can't bet on that. :)

Can you write up what description would be good for the free-text
questions around the "impact"? I think all the other concerns are
already covered by the current fields.

cheers,
--renato