Developer Satisfaction Survey/2023/Phabricator

⚙️ Phabricator
 🔗 Phabricator use over the past year

We asked survey takers, “In the past year, have you used Wikimedia Phabricator?”


 * The majority (97%) of respondents said they used Phabricator during the past year
 * 5% said they did not use it during the past year
 * 3% were unsure



 🔗 Phabricator satisfaction

"💬 phab is very cool, do not get the idea to migrate away from it!"  42% 👍  Almost half (42%) of the open comments were either positive or neutral.

Among the most mentioned negative comments were:
 * Difficulty for newcomers (seen in the tenure breakdown)
 * Phacility (Phabricator's previous upstream) closing it's doors

🌠 Phabricator's new upstream is called "Phorge"

We asked survey takers, “How satisfied are you with Phabricator?”

Of the survey takers who indicated they had used Phabricator in the past year,
 * The majority (73%) of respondents said they were satisfied with Phabricator
 * 11% said they were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
 * 14% said they were dissatisfied
 * 2% were unsure



 🔗 Phabricator satisfaction (by role)

Of the survey takers who indicated they had used Phabricator in the past year,
 * All but two role groups had a majority indicate they were satisfied with Phabricator
 * SRE/infrastructure developers and data engineers had less than half indicate satisfaction with Phabricator (46% each), but both groups had more respondents indicating satisfaction than dissatisfaction.



 🔗 Phabricator satisfaction (by tenure)

Of the survey takers who indicated they had used Phabricator in the past year,
 * All tenure groups had a majority of respondents indicating they were satisfied with Phabricator
 * Respondents with 0-1 years tenure had the lowest percentage of respondents indicating they were satisfied with Phabricator (52%)



 🔗 Phabricator features ranked by priority

We asked survey takers, “How would you rank the importance of the following features of Phabricator? Rank the following from 1 (most important) to 7 (least important).”

Respondents were asked to rank the following features:


 * Shared space for staff and volunteers
 * Availability of workboards
 * Availability of workboard / team metrics
 * Availability of the conduit API
 * Integrations with other tools (Gerrit / GitLab / IRC)
 * Ability to track the work of other individuals / teams
 * Shared historical context
 * Another feature not listed above

"Shared space for staff and volunteers" was the most commonly ranked #1 feature, and the feature with the highest average rank.

The features with the lowest average ranks were "availability of workboard/team metrics" and "availability of the conduit API".



There was no clear consensus on "Another feature not listed above." People listed things like:
 * Search
 * Code hosting
 * One-to-many developer conversations
 * Better enforcement of the safe-space policy

 ←🧪 Beta 💯 Code review→