[Labs-l] Fall 2015 Tool Labs user survey data published

[Bryan Davis]

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:35 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Bryan,
>
> Thanks for the report. With this information in hand, what follow up is
> planned?

The primary purpose of the study was to set a baseline of qualitative
("how are we doing") responses. These will be used to gauge
increase/decrease in satisfaction in comparison to future surveys.
Tool Labs staff get regular feedback from people who are either
extremely happy or extremely unhappy with services, but a broad survey
like this is helpful to determine the general satisfaction of those
who are not motivated to provide feedback by a single incident. No
specific timetable has been set yet, but I expect to see another
survey run between October and December of this year.

Data from this survey, especially the free form comments, has already
been shaping the quarterly planning for the Labs techops team and my
more recent Tool Labs support initiative. I would say that a focus on
making Tool Labs easier to use, especially by individuals who are not
experts in the Unix command-line, is a general theme that is being
pursued as we also seek to replace aging services like Sun Grid Engine
and increase overall stability of the platform.

One of the things that stood out the most for me personally in the
feedback was a general need for tutorials and other task focused
technical documentation. This is an area that I would like to
encourage the existing Tool Labs developers to help with. There are
some ideas of things to write in Phabricator [0][1]. Generally we are
lacking on "big picture" documentation. We have a lot of documentation
on solving particular problems but even those documents can be
difficult to find and understand as they are mostly written with an
assumption of familiarity with the services and terminology used in
Tool Labs.

[0]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T101659
[1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123425

Bryan
-- 
Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <bd808 at wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer            Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855