UDC Data Update
The Eclipse Usage Data Collector has been running for several months now. I spent a few minutes yesterday cleaning up the presentation of the data.
The Usage Data Collector page on eclipse.org now has fresh links to the report data. You’ll notice some changes. For example, all the report data is available in CSV (comma-separated values) format files for download and manipulation using your favourite software. I have the data in two formats. The first format, labeled “csv” contains the data in straight tabular form:
As you can see, it’s broken down by year/month, view id, execute count, and user count. In the case of a view, “execute count” is the number of times that the view has been activated (i.e. brought into focus by the user). As implied by the name, “user count” refers to the number of users who have activated the view at least once in the month.
The “trend” download is provided as a convenience. It’s the same data, but with the execute count and user count stretched out vertically; each view id is represented once in the first column. Hopefully you get the idea.
There are similar files for bundle activations, command executions, editor activations, and perspective activations. All of these reports shown only org.eclipse.* bundles that are used by more than five people. It’s relatively easy to add other types of reports, so if something is missing, please ask.
Since my favourite software is Eclipse, I used BIRT to wander through the data a bit and developed a couple of charts like this one which compares the number of times the various views in org.eclipse.ui.views are activated:
This chart is telling me a couple of things:
- March isn’t over yet
- A very large proportion of our community doesn’t use the TaskList, PropertySheet, or ProgressView
- EditorList and Bookmark view are almost never used (I’m not even sure how to find EditorList)
- A heck of a lot of people take vacations in August
This data makes me worry a little about the ResourceNavigator death march. There still seems to be a lot of folks using this view, so we need to be careful with the transition plan. It’s very good that Francis is being very public about the process (though, Francis—if you’re reading this—a blog posting or two would broaden audience).
My next step will be to fully automate the generation of these reports. Currently, they are mostly generated automatically. I have on further step. FWIW, when I do implement the full automation, the URLs of the CSV files will change.
Posted March 10th, 2009 by Wayne Beaton in category: UDC
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6 Responses to “UDC Data Update”
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Mike Says:
March 10th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
End of life of Resource Navigator? Are you serious?! Me and my collegues use that one quite often.
Mik Kersten Says:
March 11th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Neat reports Wayne. I was surprised to see the Task List view activations as only done by 14% of users, since surveys like EDC have put the Mylyn usage considerably higher. Some of our other numbers looked overly low too, which made us realize that not all of our usage is being logged, since there are scenarios where we invoke actions directly from code. For Galileo we’ll take a pass to make sure that the key Mylyn interactions are being tracked by UDC.
S
Eugene Kuleshov Says:
March 16th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Mik, the only reason Task List view is activated is because it is the part of the standard Java perspective, but it doesn’t mean that anyone is using it, so the number of Task Editor activations is more representative value for the task list usage. The number of “activate context” action invocations will give you a very sad number of how many people actually using the focused UI. Unless, of course, I missing something.
Robert Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 8:46 am
Is there any plan to open-source the code which you wrote for analysis of the UDC data?
There are some companies that would like to gather such data to measure their internal usage, and they would rather not reinvent the wheel if the analysis code is already written.
Wayne Beaton Says:
April 20th, 2009 at 8:06 am
There is nothing as formal as a plan right now. We do intend to make it available, but haven’t quite sorted out where it fits. Having folks such as yourself interested in it increases the priority. I’ll restart the discussion…
Robert Says:
April 29th, 2009 at 9:02 am
OK, thanks. Then to formalize the request, I opened bugzilla https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=274294 . Hopefully other people will chime in.
Half of the magic is in the nice reports you are producing