Hi everyone, I've been talking with quite a few people in back channels about putting together a survey for the Maven user community, in order to see whether we can find out what features they find important or in dire need of attention. Then, we can (hopefully) use this information to help prioritize our work. The idea is to get the community involved more deeply...instead of simply using Maven, they can get involved with shaping its future in a very real way.
To do this, I need all of your help. I've started a wiki page that explores some of the concepts that have come from the various discussions I've had with different developers over the past weeks: http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Survey+for+Maven+2.1+requirements If anyone is interested in reading and giving feedback, I'd really appreciate it. At first, I'd like to focus on what types of information (broadly speaking) we want to gather from the user community. Keep in mind that we're trying to direct the effort that will go into Maven 2.1, so prioritizing work according to the intensity of pain and proportion of users feeling it is important. Once we've pretty well nailed down the subject matter of the survey, we can get into how to phrase individual questions in order to extract the most effective, useful information. When we have a first draft of the questions, I think it would be a great idea to let the users list see it and give feedback, before their answers are tallied. That way, if there are glaring omissions in the survey, users will have an opportunity to point them out. At the end of all this, we (users and developers) can all take the survey together - along with any non-users that we can attract via blogging, etc. - and see what we can learn about Maven in the wild. BTW, I mentioned giving this survey to non-users, and I believe this is critical, particularly for those who thought about using Maven, and decided against it. We need to know how Maven failed to meet their needs, in order to make Maven a better tool, IMO. Feel free to discuss here or on the wiki. I'll try to make sure the relevant points made here are captured on the wiki. Thanks, -john
