Invitation to participate in a survey about Django

[Tan, J.]

Dear Django contributor,

We are doing research on understanding how developers manage a special kind of Technical Debt in Python.

We kindly ask 15-20 minutes of your time to fill out our survey. To help you decide whether to fill it in, we clarify two points.

“Why should I answer this survey?”

Your participation is essential for us to correctly understand how developers manage Technical Debt.

“What is in it for me?”

Your valuable contributions to Django are part of the information we analyzed for this study. Thus, if you help us further by answering this survey, there are two immediate benefits:

• you help to improve the efficiency of maintaining the quality of Django.
• the results will be used to propose recommendations to manage technical debt and create tool support. 

Here is the link to the survey.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Kind regards,
Jie Tan, Daniel Feitosa and Paris Avgeriou

Software Engineering and Architecture group
Faculty of Science and Engineering
University of Groningen, the Netherlands

[Tom Forbes]

I receive a few of these kinds of emails privately (I’m assuming they scrape my email from git history). On one hand I think it might be appropriate to post something like this to the developers mailing list if it was specifically targeted to Django, and it’s definitely good to help with research. 

On the other hand, like many of the other emails I receive this looks to be an impersonal and auto-generated one (the bold really doesn’t help) with a completely vague call to action: your requirement to “understand how technical debt is managed” means nothing to me and doesn’t entice me to spend time answering 18+ questions on a Google form for you. 

The “what’s in it for me” section is also completely meaningless - how will answering this help me maintain the quality of Django? So to me this is basically spam and I don’t think it’s appropriate to post here. I’m replying publicly in case anyone else has any opinions on if this constitutes as (academic) spam or not. 

In the hopes of being constructive I’d suggest perhaps a paragraph explaining who you are, what the actual concrete work is that you are doing, how our contributions can help further that and the outcomes you want to achieve. Because right now you could replace startlingly few words to turn this into an email about people’s thoughts on the new Pepsi flavor. 

Tom

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[Adam Johnson]

I receive an average of one academic survey a week. I think it's a terrible shame that computer science academia has descended to the same level as the worst spammers, scraping emails and sending them unsolicited "research" emails, without a mote of personal thought/engagement.

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Adam