Survey on DVCS usage and experience

Hello everybody. I'm part of a team conducting a survey to understand the perceived benefits and challenges of using a decentralized or distributed version control systems (DVCS) in software development. Presuming that most people on this list have used a DVCS :) we would like to invite all people over 18 years old to participate in our survey and share your experiences. Details on partcipating are below. Thanks for your time!

Brian.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- An increasing number of software projects have or are considering switching their code repositories to a decentralized or distributed VCS (DVCS). There are many such DVCS tools, including git, bzr, mercurial, monotone, or bitkeeper. We are conducting a survey to assess the perceived benefits and challenges of using a DVCS. We would ask that any individuals who use or are comfortable using a DVCS for managing the artifacts for a project to please consider completing the survey. The survey has several open-ended questions, and may take up to 20 minutes to complete.

The data collected from this study will be used in articles for publication in journals and conference proceedings. The results of this study will provide additional knowledge and guidance for projects considering moving to using a DVCS.

This is an anonymous survey. Any personal information divulged in answering a question will be kept strictly confidential.

The survey is at:

    http://www.cs.usask.ca/~bsd178/research/dvcs-survey/

Please feel free to redistribute this to other interested groups.

If you would like more detail about the survey, or information not included here, please contact us.

    Brian de Alwis
    Department of Computer Science
    University of Saskatchewan
    brian.de.alwis@usask.ca

This research has the ethical approval of the Research Ethics Office at the University of Saskatchewan. If you have any concerns about your treatment or rights as a research subject, please contact the office at 306-966-2084.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

-- Brian de Alwis | HCI Lab | University of Saskatchewan On bike helmets: "If you think your hair is more important than your brain, you're probably right." (B. J. Wawrykow)

Brian de Alwis <brian.de.alwis@usask.ca> writes:

I don't know what channels did you use to distribute information about this survey, but you might want to consider the following additional channels (some of those channels were used in announcing Git User's Survey in 2006-2008, see e.g. http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2008):

 * Mailing lists for other DVCS you include in your survey, like
   Bazaar and Monotone (in addition to current Git and Mercurial),
   perhaps using GMane news (NNTP, Usenet) to mail interface.

 * Homepages and/or wikis for DVCS such as Git, Mercurial, Bazaar,
   Monotone, Darcs.  Git User's Surveys were announced on Git homepage
   (http://git-scm.com) and Git Wiki (http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/)

 * News / Announcement sections of software hosting sites, and/or
   blogs for those hosting sites.  Git User's Surveys were announced
   on git hosting sites: repo.or.cz, git.kernel.org, Gitorious and
   GitHub.  You might want to contact admin of BitBucket (Mercurial)
   and Launchpad (Bazaar), and some commercial hosting sites, to add
   announcement about survey.

 * Blogs related to DVCS or version control in general such as
   http://www.versioncontrolblog.com/ and/or blogs by maintainers,
   creators, or people important to given DVCS like Junio C. Hamano or
   Linus Torvalds for Git, or Mark Shuttleworth for Bazaar (via
   Ubuntu), or Bram Cohen for Codeville; or perhaps generic
   programmers blogs such as Eric Sink blog or Coding Horror, or Joel
   On Software.

 * You might also want to either announce from time to time on DVCS
   related IRC channels (mainly on FreeNode) such as #revctrl, #git,
   #bazaar, #mercurial, #monotone, #github etc., or ask sysop to add
   announcement to channel topic (using some kind of URL shortening
   service, with menmonic short name)

 * Git User's Survey 2008 was also announced on Ohloh, open source
   software metric site.

 * You might also want to at least try to add announcement on news
   sites such as LWN.net or community sites such as Slashdot, Digg or
   Reddit; the latter might prove difficult...

I hope that this would help.