Results of the Feb 2022 repo survey for dotnet/aspnetcore

[captainsafia]

Greetings ASP.NET Core community!

A few months back, we sent out a survey to the community to get some feedback on how approachable and productive our repo was (amongst other factors). This post is a summary of the results of this survey for curious minds.

First things first, we had a total of 33 respondents for the survey. It's a considerable drop from the 61 we had last year, so we want to focus on a higher response rate moving forward.

Overall Satisfaction
The NSAT score for the repo was overall improved for this area (+22 between 2021 and 2022). We invested some time over the past year in adding Codespaces support for the repo, adding a form for reporting bugs, and updating documentation on our triage process which we attribute to improvements in this score.

How easy is it to find a fix?
In 2021, we spent some time adding README's documenting the contents of each directory in our repo to make it easier to understand where different code components lived. With this in mind, we've seen improvements in the "ease of finding where to make a fix" stat for the repo.

How responsive is the maintainer team to issues?
Each sub-team within the ASP.NET Core repo does around 2-3 triage sessions per week where we review newly filed issues. This shows in a generally improved NSAT for our responsiveness query. We continue to find ways to make sure that our triages are timely and that each issue is addressed in a speedy manner. Ensuring that bug reports are complete and reproducible is a great way to help us out in this effort!

Ability to debug code
One of the primary factors we consider when assessing repo productivity is tracking how easy it is to debug a code change. We've improved a bit in this regard with the introduction of Codespaces support and improvements to our Visual Studio installation scripts. However, we continue to focus on improvements for this area as there is still some difficulty when it comes to building the repo.

Suggestions
Improving our repo is an on-going process and we've captured a few suggestions from the survey that outline worthwhile improvements including:

• "when labeling the issues, having a priority level added will be nice to have so we will know the possible ETA on issue resolution."
• "The build process needs to allow me easier to build a part of the full repo. When I want to contribute to a small part of the project, I really don't care about the other parts, especially native or Java dependent stuff. Just give me an out of the box experience to build just the things I want. Also: it's unclear how to use the modified ASP.NET Core code with an (existing) ASP.NET Core application then to test the changes."
• "Provide an environment so that contributors can work on more challenging issues rather than the issues with "Help Wanted""