A Reminder : A Study on Free/Open Source Software

[Robert Knight]

Dear Anu,

Almost all of the questions in the survey are marked as 'required'.
If you would like more people to participate in the survey and get
better data, I would recommend that you make more of the questions
optional.

My impression is that the survey is written very much from the
perspective of a traditional software development process and as such
some of the questions are difficult to respond to in the context of
free software.  For example:

> What is the estimated Number of Current Users of the Software Product?

I imagine that not very many projects are able to answer this question
with any degree of accuracy.  For example, if I develop a software
project, I might record say 2000 downloads of the code from my site.
It might be the case that 1950 of those were by individuals who are
getting the code for their sole usage.  The other 50 might be Linux
distributions or developers working to make a Windows / MacOS build.
Each of those 50 might then distribute the product in a different form
to 10,100,10000 or 100000 people - depending on their own number of
users.

Other questions ask for fairly specific metrics ( such as % change
from release to release, types of defects recorded etc. ).  I do not
think that there is much data available on that for many free software
projects at present, certainly not for the many small projects in
existence.  The source data to produce these metrics exists in many
cases ( often provided by analysing logs from the version control
system or looking at bugzilla data ) but the work of actually
analysing and summarising that data has not been done, because it is a
slightly tedious task and tends to get overlooked in favour of more
enjoyable ones.

Questions 23 and 24 provide checkboxes where I think a ranking system
from 1-5 would be more appropriate.

Other questions assume the presence of a set list of requirements for
what the software should do and how it should behave.  Again, these
often do not exist.  I would guess that the majority of projects have
a vision of what they want to achieve, which often appears on the
project's web page ( usually no more than a paragraph of text ) and
perhaps a roadmap and even short term feature lists for some projects
but not a point-by-point list of requirements.
As Linus Torvolds once commented, free software is in many cases
evolution, not intelligent design.

Regards,
Robert.

On 12/03/07, Anu Gupta DCSA <anugupta at pu.ac.in> wrote:
> Dear KDE Contributors,
>
> I seek help from designers, developers, testers,defect fixers,project
> managers or playing any other key role in Free/Open Source software
> development or maintenence
> in carrying out a study on practices and problems of defect management in
> various Free/Open Source Software projects. The
> insights gained from the study can further help us to extract publicly
> accessible defect data and determine impact of defect management practices
> on software quality.
> Please spend a few minutes of your precious time to fill up the
> Questionnaire. The most of the questions follow multiple choice formats and
> are quite easy to answer.
>
> To have the Online Questionnaire, please visit:
>
> http://anu.puchd.ac.in/phpESP/public/survey.php?name=FOSS_Defect_Survey
>
> (You can also copy and paste this link into your browser, and hit the
> 'Return' key.)
>
> I hope you will find all the questions interesting and thought-provoking.
> Your answers will be kept anonymous.The data thus collected will
> only be used for research purpose.It would be nice if you may further refer
> this mail to others actively engaged with Free/Open Source Software
> development. If you have any query or suggestions then
> feel free to contact.
>
> Thank You
>
> With regards,
>
> Anu Gupta
> Senior Lecturer
> Department of Computer Science and Applications,
> Panjab University, Chandigarh.
> INDIA
>
>
> In case of any problem in accessing/using the above mentioned link please
> contact:
> E-mail: anugupta at pu.ac.in
>         anugupta98 at gmail.com
>
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