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Developer Satisfaction Survey/2023/Phabricator

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πŸ“–Β Developer Satisfaction 2023

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

βš™οΈΒ Phabricator

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πŸ”— Phabricator use over the past year

We asked survey takers, β€œIn 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

πŸ”— Phabricator satisfaction

πŸ’¬ phab is very cool, do not get the idea to migrate away from it!

42%

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, β€œHow 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

πŸ”— 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.

πŸ”— 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%)

πŸ”— Phabricator features ranked by priority

We asked survey takers, β€œHow 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