New Developers Quarterly Report, October 2017
Below is the planning content for Developer Survey Report, October 2017. This report is one of the many milestones of the Developer Relations new annual Onboarding New Developers Program (2017-18). Throughout the course of the annual program, we will release reports every quarter highlighting results from the previous one.
1. Goals
The goal of this report is to gather a shared understanding of how and why new developers start contributing and stay or leave our community. The report will contain information about our developer outreach activities including metrics, trends, lessons learned and recommendations. We hope that through this report we’ll have a better understanding of how we could support new developers and mentors better. It will also inform all our work related to the annual program.
2. Research Questions
From the goals above, based on what we want to learn about our new developers, our research questions are:
- What are the main motivations of new developers behind contributing to our projects?
- What challenges do they face?
- What are their current needs?
- What needs improvement in our developer metrics to achieve desired outcomes of the annual program?
3. Survey
Based on the above research questions, we are planning on collecting metrics through quantitative & qualitative data via Wikimedia’s Biterg and Online Surveys.
3.1 Possible Candidates
For online surveys, candidates who contributed code in the last three months will be considered. This would also include newcomers who submitted patch for the first time in this timeframe.
3.2 Questions
Keeping in mind our goals, research questions and what kind of data each question is for (developer metrics, motivations, challenges, needs), here we list some:
3.2.1 Developer Metrics
Through Survey
- Demographics
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Location (City & Country)
- Background
- Current Affiliation
- Years of experience developing software
- Other professional development activities outside work (open source projects, conferences, writing books, etc)
- What type of contribution you are involved in w/ Wikimedia (bug fixes or typos, reporting bugs, feature development, maintenance, etc) ?
- How often do you contribute code to Wikimedia projects?
Through Bitergia/Gerrit etc.
- To see a big picture: How many developers we attracted and retained every year in the last five years?
- How many commits we received and merged in the last quarter?
- How many developers contributed in the last quarter?
- How many developers actively contributed (~5 commits?) in the last quarter?
- How many new developers we attracted and retained in the last quarter?
- How many new developers did we onboard and retain from the developer outreach programs and events in the last quarter?
- Which project receives most contributions from developers?
- How many developers landed on our how-to-contribute pages in the last quarter? What were the referral paths? (Page Views)
3.2.2 Motivations
- How did you first hear about Wikimedia?
- What motivated you to contribute to Wikimedia?
- How did you pick your first project to contribute to?
3.2.3 Challenges
Note: questions below could vary a bit for users who don’t contribute frequently
- What is that one thing that you struggled with most while making your first contribution to Wikimedia?
- Where are you currently in your understanding of the Wikimedia's code contribution process?
- What are the challenges that you encounter a lot?
- Where do you currently seek most help from when stuck in a problem while working on your project?
- What’s been most helpful to you in your journey with Wikimedia so far?
- What learning resources do you refer to for Wikimedia projects?
- How do you rate your experience contributing to Wikimedia?
- How often do you believe your contributions are utilized?
3.2.4 Needs
- What could we improve in our contribution process to support you better?
4. Feedback
Find out about the ethical and legal concerns associated with conducting this survey and get feedback from Ed, Melody, and members of research team
5. Resources for inspiration
- Tips for great surveys
- Stackoverflow developer survey
- Open source metrics guide
- The rise and decline of an open collaboration system
- Mozilla community metrics
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