[Wien] survey results

[Stefaan Cottenier]

One week ago, a two-question survey was posted on this mailing list.
Here comes the result and a discussion/interpretation of the data.

The goal of the survey was to collect quantitative information on the
following hypothesis:

"In the transition from code development to code usage, inevitable some 
awareness and knowledge about fine (?) details gets lost. Developers 
tend to think that users know more than they actually do. While users 
tend to think that there are less hidden subtleties than there actually 
are. It might well be that grey intermediate area of supposed/lacking 
knowledge is far larger than either of both parties thinks it is."

The discussion of one week ago about the relation between RKmax and Rmt 
offered an opportunity to collect some data to examine this hypothesis. 
The topic was one about which an experienced user could think: "You 
can't use wien2k properly if you don't know this." While a 'general 
user' could think: "I can survive without this."

34 people filled out the survey. Less than the 100 I hoped for, but 
nevertheless sufficient for meaningful conclusions. The results can be 
found for a while at 
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10829484/Results%20RKmax%20survey.pdf (attachment 
too large for this list).

1/3 of the respondents say they could have given the right answer on the 
RKmax question themselves. 2/3 say this was new for them. As one can 
expect that users who have no clue at all about the topic are less
likely to take part in the survey, it seems fair to conclude that 75% or 
more of the wien2k community was not aware about this RKmax issue. A
number that might surprise some people.

Whereas the first question of the survey roughly probes 'understanding', 
the second question of the survey asked about 'experience' (measured as 
the amount of years someone has been using wien2k). Slightly less than 
one half of the respondents were relatively new users (<3y), the other 
half were quite to very much experienced (>3y, >7y). It is interesting 
to correlate the answers on both questions in a knowledge-vs-experience 
graph (3th page of 
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10829484/Results%20RKmax%20survey.pdf ) 
:

It is reassuring to observe in this correlation that roughly spoken 
understanding seems to increase as a function of experience (or time). 
Nevertheless, even in the category of the most experienced users (>7y), 
there are still almost twice as many who were not aware of the RKmax 
issue than those who were (26% vs. 15%).

This is only a rough observation, that does not pretend to be a 
statistically significant scientific study. It does point to a trend, 
however.

The bottom line: is there anything all of us, as a community, can do to 
improve the knowledge transfer towards 'general users'? Feel free to 
discuss this on this mailing list, and in particular, to post suggestions.

Stefaan