> The biggest challenge/problem was dealing with the huge volume of data on our servers. Just managing the data was very time consuming.
One approach for keeping usage data volume under control is to progressively reduce resolution of data. For instance, initially you may be able to count users who used feature X on a given day, but further out you can only count users who used feature X on a given month, even further out you only get yearly resolution. This can and has been fully automated in other similar systems.
> I wonder if we might consider some kind of "user survey" option
A user survey is better than nothing, but we are definitely going to get far fewer survey responses than opt-ins for automated usage data collection, which makes the answers less valuable.
- Konstantin
From: cross-project-issues-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:cross-project-issues-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Wayne Beaton
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2013 2:20 PM
To: cross-project-issues-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] FW: [Doug on the Eclipse CDT] New comment on "Eclipse smells kind of dead"???.
The biggest challenge/problem was dealing with the huge volume of data on our servers. Just managing the data was very time consuming.
I wonder if we might consider some kind of "user survey" option: a menu item that brings up a dialog with a couple of easy-to-answer questions that includes a checkbox grant of permission to transmit workstation preferences to the Eclipse Foundation.
Intuitively, I think that we could easily deal with that volume of data. We may still have to deal with privacy concerns; some of the preferences values may contain server names and such...
Wayne
On 07/15/2013 01:05 PM, Pascal Rapicault wrote:
Is that a hardware limitation or personnel one?
I’m asking because despite the retirement of UDC, it is still widely used by several corporations (Google, Ericsson,…) to track Eclipse internal usage, so I’m thinking that there may be ppl ready to help.
It's an interesting thought.
But it sounds a lot like the Usage Data Collector (UDC). Unfortunately, we didn't collect this sort of information and the UDC has been shut down.
Any time you "call home", you're going to make somebody angry. There are always privacy issues to consider. This means that some sort of UI element is required to allow the user to opt in.
At this point in time, we do not have the resources to re-implement the UDC or something like it.
Wayne
On 07/15/2013 12:53 PM, Mickael Istria wrote:
On 07/15/2013 06:44 PM, Konstantin Komissarchik wrote:
Regarding default preferences, the “best” thing to do is to capture what preferences the users are tweaking using an automated usage collection system. Then one can produce a report showing, for instance, how many users prefer line numbers in the margin. If the stats really do favor line numbers, then the default setting should be revisited regardless of history. If the stats show the opposite, then the reports can be published, which should partly help to pacify those who incorrectly assume that their preference is representative of the majority.
+1, that's a good idea.
In any case, such reports should be made public. It shows users that they have some control on the deliveries. And their content will be very nice input to the most famous trolls of code style (tab vs margins, 80 columns...).
Should I open a bug to suggest this "Preference Collector" mechanism?
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