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
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