A Survey?

We can get a bit of an idea about what and how people are doing things with
Dolphin Smalltalk from reading this newsgroup.  However I do not recall ever
having taken a survey about Dolphin Smalltalk.  It would be interesting to
me to understand how Dolphin is being used by others.  I should think that
is information would also be of use to OA, commercial add-on developers, and
even goodie developers.  I am thinking of something like Jim Robertson's
surveys, but with Dolphin specific questions.  Has anyone else thought about
doing this?  I could potentially put together some kind of survey on my own,
but I wonder if it would be more appropriate for OA to do it since it would
be more official, and I am just some random guy on the net.  If OA did it
perhaps they could even invite people to respond when they eventually send
out their upgrade notice as well as posting a link here.  I suspect there
may be quite a few Dolphin users who never make it here to c.l.s.d.  However
I would like to see the results of the survey shared with everyone who
completes it.  I am not sure if OA would be OK with that for business
reasons.

Does anyone else think something like this would be a good idea?  How does
OA feel?

Here are some example questions (please don't actually answer these here),
perhaps others can contribute additional questions or answer choices.  I
think we should try to provide good multiple choice options to aid in
analysis, but also allow other answers where appropriate.

Possible boiler plate:
All questions bellow would pertain to one's usage of Dolphin only, not other
tools.  If one is both a business and personal user one can optionally
respond once for Business and once for Personal if the typical usage is
different.

Do you use Dolphin for Business or Personal use?
How many years have you been using Smalltalk?
How many years have you been using Dolphin?
Is Smalltalk the first programming language you learned?
How did you find first out about Dolphin Smalltalk? [newsgroup, associate,
web search, magazine article]
Have you switched primary development to Smalltalk from another language
(Check all that apply)?  [Java, C, C++, VB, PowerBuilder, Delphi, ADA,
COBOL, LISP, Prolog, Fortran, Actor, Other (please specify)]
What is your business sector? [Insurance, Financial, Engineering, Academic,
Retail, Government]
Do you sell standard software programs developed in Dolphin?
Do you offer custom software solutions developed in Dolphin?
Do you perform Dolphin Smalltalk consultancy?
How many copies of Dolphin are you responsible for?
Do you use a source control system? [None, STS, PAX File Based, Other
(please specify)]
Are you happy with the way you currently implement team development? [very
happy, content, needs improvement]
What would make team development in Dolphin easier?
Do you use relational databases with Dolphin?
How do you work with relational Databases (Check all that apply)? [ODBC
(DBConnection), ADO,  ReStore, GLORP, Other (please specify)]
What relational databases do you use (Check all that apply)?  [MS Access
(JET), MySQL, SQLServer, Oracle, DB2, Other (please specify)]
Do you work with object databases?
How do you work with object databases (Check all that apply)? [Omnibase,
Pachyderm, Other (please specify)]
Do you run dolphin based server applications?
What server technologies do you use (Check all that apply)? [CGI, Swazoo,
Other (please specify)]
Do you use the Extreme Programming methodology?
What is your working style? [All applications in one image, Each application
in its own image, Multiple images but more than one application in each
image]
How often do you save packages? [Every time I leave the image, when major
changes are made, only when I need to distribute changes].
How often do you load packages? [Every time I start an image, only when I
need to import changes from another image].
Do you use freely available Dolphin add-ons (goodies)?
Do you develop freely available Dolphin add-ons (goodies)?
What is your favorite goodie (that you did not develop)?
How often do you visit the Dolphin newsgroup (comp.lang.smalltalk.dolphin)?
How often do you visit the Smalltalk newsgroup (comp.lang.smalltalk)?
Do you visit any newsgroups?
How would you rate the current documentation?
How important is documentation to you?

...

I am sure others could contribute additional questions, or help rephrase
these.  This may seem a bit long, but I think if comprehensive choices were
provided for the questions that it could be completed fairly quickly.  I
think this would help us understand who the typical Dolphin user is, and
what is important to them.

Comments?

Chris

Christopher J. Demers wrote:

> Comments?

Questions like:

    Which of the following would you rather see OA put dev. effort into:

    (Low-level stuff)
           - Faster VM
           - Support OS-level threads
           - Support namespaces
            - ...or whatever...

    (IDE stuff)
            - Increased RB facilities
            - Team programming support
            - Documentation
            - ...or whatever...

    (Library facilities)
            - Data-aware components
            - Printing
            - Wrappers/framework for report generation
            - ...or whatever...

might be helpful to OA.

OTOH, I've only ever filled in one of Jim Robertson's surveys and have stopped
looking at the results -- too much scatter for the data to mean much.

Put it like this, I (just personally) feel rather lukewarm about the idea, but
if anyone wants answers to such questions enough to be bothered to create and
host a survey, then I'd probably be willing to fill in the answers.

    -- chris