📖 Developer Satisfaction 2023

🏆 Quality

💬 It often seems like we would rather build the next big new thing by declaring some software to be too ridden by technical debt to work with.

We asked survey takers, “Considering the software projects you’ve contributed to in your role as a member of the Wikimedia Developer Community this past year: What is your perception of the current level of technical debt?”

• The majority (69%) of respondents perceived the technical debt level as high
• 20% perceived the level as neither high nor low
• 6% perceived the level as low
• 5% were unsure

💬 Lack of maintenance of critical code in Wikimedia is hurting and will continue to hurt everyone. This needs to change.

We asked survey takers, “In the past year, how has technical debt affected your productivity as a member of the Wikimedia Developer Community?”

• The majority of respondents (83%) said technical debt affected their productivity
• 14% were unsure
• 3% said it had no effect on their productivity

We asked survey takers, “How would you rate the quality of the code you maintain in your role as a member of the Wikimedia Developer Community?”

• The majority of respondents (51%) rated the quality of code they maintain as high quality
• 27% rated the quality as neither high nor low quality
• 15% were unsure
• 7% rated the quality as low

We asked survey takers, “How would you rate the quality of third-party code (libraries, language ecosystems) that you depend on in your role as a member of the Wikimedia Developer Community?”

• 42% of respondents rated the quality of third-party code as high quality
• 25% were unsure
• 22% rated the quality as neither high nor low
• 11% rated the quality as low

We asked participants, “In the past year, how has code quality affected your productivity as a member of the Wikimedia Developer Community?”

• The majority of respondents (73%) said code quality affected their productivity
• 17% were unsure
• 10% said it had no effect on their productivity

A few respondents raised challenges or problems with this section.

A meta note about technical debt:

💬 It's very hard to define unambiguously "technical debt".

And problems we should address in future iterations of the survey:

💬 I feel these questions are too vague to give a coherent answer to. Things vary so considerably between projects.

💬 I said technical debt affected my work in a major way, because the major portion of my work for several months of this year has been retiring technical debt.