Comments on: Add-on Developers Survey: Raw Results

By: Brett Zamir

Brett Zamir — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:03:42 +0000

“With that much wanting moderately better documentation, it’s surprising that devmo’s documentation was rated as highly as it was.”

I’d venture that maybe it is due to the vastness of the Mozilla platform. What is documented is nice and helpful but there’s so much more (especially XPCOM) that could be documented with examples, etc.

By: Maciej

Maciej — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:34:42 +0000

Was this survey only for Firefix Add-on authors or for Thunderbird as well? I have written a Thunderbird add-on only, so I decided not to fill the form. The title clearly indicated you want Firefox add-on authors only. Will there be a similar survey for Thunderbird?

By: Sébastien Marinier

Sébastien Marinier — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:23:08 +0000

@Joshua : In Q8, you see also an IDE might help. In developer’s mind (in mine also), when you hav an “IDE”, you have some useful tools like completion code, searchable (and organized) documentation, browsable class tree… 17% + 3% is greater than 15%

Moreover, maybe the lack of time (Q6) is due partially to the hours spent to search Code Samples, class documentation, a.s.o…

By: bhashem

bhashem — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:45:03 +0000

@Steve, if you take a look at how the question was phrased (see survey), several choices were fixed so the percentage is what percentage of people chose an answer. A more in-depth analysis of tools is required, the question was geared at understanding what category of dev tools was being used.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:26:26 +0000

The way you’re graphing the data is rather odd. e.g using a pie chart for Q7 is a bit silly, since the percentages aren’t of any meaningful total.

By: Joshua Cranmer

Joshua Cranmer — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:51:46 +0000

Just looking at these results, one piece of information I find surprising is the documentation aspect. About 15% say they were challenged by inaccurate documentation, but only 3% said better documentation would help them code better… If you count those wanting “bigger picture” documentation (i.e., tutorials and other source code), that accounts for about 40% of the responders. With that much wanting moderately better documentation, it’s surprising that devmo’s documentation was rated as highly as it was.