Developer Satisfaction Survey/2024/Developer environments
📖 Developer Satisfaction 2024 Report
🧑💻 Developer Environments
edittl;dr
- Role – Most roles use a MediaWiki development environment, except SREs and data engineers.
- Tenure – Respondents with less than 3 years of tenure use MediaWiki Docker, respondents who've been around longer use a self-created environment.
- Satisfaction – People are satisfied with Docker-based environments, generally.
- Onboarding – This is the first year we've asked about onboarding.
# Personal developer environments use
We asked survey takers: “Do you use a personal development environment for MediaWiki?”
The majority (60.4%) of respondents indicated they use a personal development environment for MediaWiki.
# Personal development environment use by role
Like last year, 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 a MediaWiki development environment.
# Personal development environment use by tenure
Like last year, among respondents with 0-1 year tenure, less than half indicated they use a personal development environment.
In all other tenure groups – like last year – more than half of respondents use a personal development environment.
# MediaWiki development environments used
We asked survey takers, “Which environment(s) do you use regularly in your role as a member of the Wikimedia Developer Community?”
Like last year, the majority of respondents indicated that they use MediaWiki Docker and/or a self-created environment.
# MediaWiki development environments used (by tenure)
Like last year, 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.
# Development environment satisfaction
We asked survey takers, “How 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.
Like last year, overall, people are more satisfied with our docker based environments.
# Development environment onboarding satisfaction
We asked survey takers, “How satisfied are you with the time it takes to onboard new contributors onto setting up a personal development environment?”
We examined their responses based on the environment they said they used.
Overall, respondents appear to be more satisfied with onboarding on our Docker-based environments.
# Environment data satisfaction
We asked survey takers, “How satisfied are you with the data available in a personal development environment (e.g., articles, edit histories, users, templates)?”
We examined their responses based on the environment they said they used.
# Feedback
We asked survey takers, “Please share any other feedback you may have about MediaWiki personal development environments”. Some themes emerged in the answers.
Setting up extensions
Docker-based environments offer little support for setting up extensions.
Setting up MediaWiki core can be very simple (from my experience with a Mac), but it's installing some extensions where it gets tricky.
MW-Docker is great, I love it. The only downside is that there's no automation for installing hard-to-install extensions.
“production-like”
Many responses mentioned the need for “production-like” environments. Of course, production-like means different things to different people.
Its' difficult to get a production like environment set-up locally especially the wiki-family setup and jobqueue.
It would be great if it was easier to setup "test Wikis" that have features similar to English Wikipedia.
Until there is a standard test environment for MediaWiki deployments that include microservices in Kubernetes, we will continue to suffer these kinds of bugs.