On 4 Aug 06, at 6:44 PM 4 Aug 06, John Casey wrote:
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
As you've mentioned in the Wiki you are trying to capture information
from current users to drive the direction of Maven 2.1, but also
trying to find non-users decided against using Maven. Maybe it is
best to break this down into two separate surveys. I'm transferring
your questions into our SurveyMonkey account so that we can keep the
actual survey up-to-date. We might also want to have a couple dry
runs to find out what options we're missing. For example you can
provide the standard "other" response which if used frequently in
trial runs might indicate standard responses we're missing. Jesse
might know more about developing surveys before final release, but I
would imagine dry runs would be valuable. Just using SurveyMonkey
seriously for the first time but I'll provide a link to survey. The
info about the SurveyMonkey account is in the maven account @
maven.org so anyone with access there tweak the survey.
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.
Sure, I'm going over the questions now and definitely have some
things to add after doing presentations and training all last month.
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.
Definitely letting the users shape the questions would be good and
dry runs of the survey to help bolster weak points.
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.
Right, as mentioned above I think this might indicate a couple
separate surveys.
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.
Will do, thanks for collecting the first set of questions. It will
certainly help us with our direction and I'd be curious to see how
many other OSS projects have actually something like this.
Thanks,
-john
Jason van Zyl
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