Monday, April 07, 2008
What do you do? Geospatial Developer Survey
Posted on Monday, April 07, 2008 10:39:13 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)  Comments [4] | 
Categories: .NET | ArcGIS Devt | Community

surveyOver the years I've seen a few "developer" surveys put out by various GIS organizations, and they have all been pretty bland. After talking to a few people at the Developer Summit about this, I thought I'd see if we could do a little better - thus the launch of the 2008 Geospatial Developer Survey.

Why are you doing this?

The main reason is that I'm interested in knowing more about how other people doing GIS/Geospatial development work. How many people view themselves as software engineers vs. occasional coders who hack some stuff together as needed. I want to know if people are exploring and adopting the tools, patterns and practices that are common place in main stream software development. And if not, why.

And beyond my curiosity, I'm also looking for some insight as to what topics people want to know more about. Although I have some ideas, lets hear from you. I get a fair number of requests to write more "fundamentals" type posts, and at the same time get requests for more on patterns, Inversion of Control and Unit testing. Since I don't write this blog for a living, I need to focus my efforts, so I hope that this survey will help quantify which way I should lean in future postings.

Who should take the survey?

Anyone who writes any code that is geospatial in nature. From the Google Maps Mashup dudes, to those running some geoprocessing tasks with python. If you write code that has anything to do with a map, you're the perfect person to take the survey. Be sure to pass this url around to everyone you work with who is a geospatial developer - the more data points we get, the better. Who knows - we may even be able to influence the content at some conferences...

How?

It's simple - just follow this link to SurveyMonkey, and fill out the questions. Yes there are 30 questions, but they should be pretty quick - I'd guess no more than 10 minutes.

What Next?

I'll be leaving they survey open until May 9th 2008. Then I'll crunch the numbers and do a post or two about the results.

Link (for copy pasting to all your developer buddies):

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=cugzupf5rAG_2bIu5WJ_2f7rxQ_3d_3d

UPDATE 4/8 @ Noon: After recieveing some feedback on the questions, I have added more "Not Applicable" and "Other" options.


Tuesday, April 08, 2008 6:19:05 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
Interesting survey - obviously a little skewed to certain types of developers and software. Very ESRI/Desktop/Enterprise/.NET biased. For example, the only question on who the vendor of software is scales from 100% ESRI to 0% ESRI /100% open-source & other. That's quite an odd scale.

Also, there are some problems with the survey that requiring answering a question even when it's not applicable. For example, first it asks for which Revision control system you use, but then requires you answer the question "Why don't you use an RCS?" and the user is forced to put in an erroneous answer. Similar for asking about .NET software specifics, if the developer doesn't use .NET.

Anyways - still looking forward to the results. It will be interesting on the clustering and the number of people that are in that 0% ESRI. Would be nice to know more on what they are using.
Andrew Turner
Tuesday, April 08, 2008 8:52:08 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
Andrew - Thanks for the feedback - I'll see if I can add better logic into the RCS question. On the software question I did not want to get too tied up on what platform people are developing on, and since ESRI is the dominant player, I figured I'd just give a scale of usage (maybe I'll do another survey on platforms during the summer). As for being .NET centric in the pick lists, that's what I know - most of them should have "Other" as an option that you can write in. Cheers! - Dave
Dave
Tuesday, April 08, 2008 9:42:28 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
Agreed on the ESRI bias. I think it will also be skewed toward results from programmers who work in a large company and wear one hat. I'm architect, programmer, or sysadmin at various times during the day and am using several different languages.
Sean Gillies
Tuesday, April 08, 2008 12:30:52 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
Agreed about both problems. Dave - the survey is fine if you want to get feedback from a .NET/ESRI crowd. Next time get an OS and perhaps Java Other vendor to review the survey before you post it. Or just keep the survey the same but pitch it differently.
Steven Citron-Pousty
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