Developer Satisfaction Survey/2023/Developer environments

πŸ“–Β Developer Satisfaction 2023

The developer satisfaction survey is an annual survey of the Wikimedia developer community.

πŸ§‘β€πŸ’» Dev environments

edit

πŸ’¬ My biggest issue with our dev environments is the fragmentation

πŸ”— 🌻 Personal development environment use

32

Number of unique topics from open answers in this section.

Hot topics in comments
Topic Negative Positive
Documentation 6 0
πŸ”₯Β Docker 6 4
πŸ”₯Β Vagrant 4 6
Multi-wiki (with docker) 6 0

We asked survey takers: ”Do you use a personal development environment for MediaWiki?”

The majority (58%) of respondents indicated they use a personal development environment for MediaWiki.

πŸ”— Personal development environment use by role

The groups least likely to use MediaWiki development environments were:

  • Data engineers
  • SRE/Infra engineers

In all other groups, the majority indicated that they use MediaWiki development environment.


πŸ”— Personal development environment use by tenure

Among respondents with 0-1 year tenure, less than half indicated they use a personal development environment.

In all other tenure groups, more than half of respondents use a personal development environment.

πŸ”— MediaWiki development environments used

We asked survey takers, β€œWhich environment(s) do you use regularly in your role as a member of the Wikimedia Developer Community?β€œ

The majority of respondents indicated that they use MediaWiki Docker and/or a self-created environment.

πŸ”— MediaWiki development environments used (by tenure)

The most commonly used environment by respondents with 0-3 years tenure is MediaWiki Docker, while the most commonly used environment for respondents with 4+ years tenure is a self-created environment.

πŸ”— Environment satisfaction

We asked survey takers, β€œHow satisfied are you with the environment(s) you use?”

If people indicated they used an environment, we asked them how satisfied they were with that environment.

Overall, people are more satisfied with our docker based environments.

πŸ”— Development environment features ranked by priority

We asked survey takers, β€œHow would you rank the following priorities for MediaWiki personal development environments?”

Respondents were asked to rank the following priorities from 1 (most important) to 8 (least important):

  • Similarity to Wikimedia production environment
  • Portability
  • Offline access
  • Reproducibility
  • Speed (e.g., page view load time, time needed to save an edit)
  • Ease of use
  • Quality of documentation, availability of support
  • Another priority not listed above

The chart shows descending order of average rank.

"Ease of use" has the highest average rank and received the most #1 rankings.

The graph does not capture "other" priorities, which had the lowest average rank and least #1 rankings.

The most common "other" priority was using a debugger (e.g., XDebug).