Developer Satisfaction Survey/2023/Phabricator
📖 Developer Satisfaction 2023
The developer satisfaction survey is an annual survey of the Wikimedia developer community.
⚙️ Phabricator
edit🔗 Phabricator use over the past year
We asked survey takers, “In the past year, have you used Wikimedia Phabricator?”
- The majority (93.7%) of respondents said they used Phabricator during the past year
- 5% said they did not use it during the past year
- 3% were unsure
🔗 Phabricator satisfaction
💬 phab is very cool, do not get the idea to migrate away from it!
Almost half (42%) of the open comments were either positive or neutral.
Among the most mentioned negative comments were:
- Difficulty for newcomers (seen in the tenure breakdown)
- Phacility (Phabricator's previous upstream) closing it's doors
🌠 Phabricator's new upstream is called "Phorge"
We asked survey takers, “How satisfied are you with Phabricator?”
Of the survey takers who indicated they had used Phabricator in the past year,
- The majority (73%) of respondents said they were satisfied with Phabricator
- 11% said they were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
- 14% said they were dissatisfied
- 2% were unsure
🔗 Phabricator satisfaction (by role)
Of the survey takers who indicated they had used Phabricator in the past year,
- All but two role groups had a majority indicate they were satisfied with Phabricator
- SRE/infrastructure developers and data engineers had less than half indicate satisfaction with Phabricator (46% each), but both groups had more respondents indicating satisfaction than dissatisfaction.
🔗 Phabricator satisfaction (by tenure)
Of the survey takers who indicated they had used Phabricator in the past year,
- All tenure groups had a majority of respondents indicating they were satisfied with Phabricator
- Respondents with 0-1 years tenure had the lowest percentage of respondents indicating they were satisfied with Phabricator (52%)
🔗 Phabricator features ranked by priority
We asked survey takers, “How would you rank the importance of the following features of Phabricator? Rank the following from 1 (most important) to 7 (least important).”
Respondents were asked to rank the following features:
- Shared space for staff and volunteers
- Availability of workboards
- Availability of workboard / team metrics
- Availability of the conduit API
- Integrations with other tools (Gerrit / GitLab / IRC)
- Ability to track the work of other individuals / teams
- Shared historical context
- Another feature not listed above
"Shared space for staff and volunteers" was the most commonly ranked #1 feature, and the feature with the highest average rank.
The features with the lowest average ranks were "availability of workboard/team metrics" and "availability of the conduit API".
There was no clear consensus on "Another feature not listed above." People listed things like:
- Search
- Code hosting
- One-to-many developer conversations
- Better enforcement of the safe-space policy