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by Martin Fowler.
Original Post: Bliki: VcsSurvey
Feed Title: Martin Fowler's Bliki
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Feed Description: A cross between a blog and wiki of my partly-formed ideas on software development
When I discussed VersionControlTools I said that it
was an unscientific agglomeration of opinion. As I was doing it I
realized that I could add some spurious but mesmerizing numbers to
my analysis by doing a survey. Google's spreadsheet makes the
mechanics of conducting a survey really simple, so I couldn't
resist.
I conducted the survey from February 23 2010 until March 3 2010
on the ThoughtWorks software development mailing list. I got 99
replies. In the survey I asked everyone to rate a number of version
control tools using the following options:
Best in Class: Either the best VCS or equal best
OK: Not the best, but you're OK with it.
Problematic: You would argue that the team really ought to be using something else
Dangerous: This tool is really bad and ThoughtWorks should press hard to have it changed
No opinion: You haven't used it
The results were this:
Tool
Best
OK
Problematic
Dangerous
No
Opinion
Active Responses
Approval %
Subversion
20
72
6
1
0
99
93%
git
65
19
1
0
14
85
99%
Mercurial
33
27
2
0
36
62
97%
ClearCase
0
3
14
41
41
58
5%
TFS
0
0
32
22
44
54
0%
CVS
0
14
59
11
15
84
17%
Bazaar
1
13
3
0
80
17
82%
Perforce
1
26
16
1
54
44
61%
VSS
1
1
11
64
22
77
3%
As well as the raw summary values, I've added two calculated
columns here to help summarize the results.
Active Responses: The total of responses excluding "No
Opinion". (eg for git: 65 + 19 + 1 + 0)
Approval %: The sum of best and ok responses divided by active
responses, expressed as a percentage. (eg for git: (65 + 19) / 85)
The graph shows a scatter plot of approval percentage and active
responses. As you can see there's a clear cluster around Subversion,
git, and Mercurial with high approval and a large amount of
responses. It's also clear that there's a big divide in approval between those
three, together with Bazaar and Perforce, versus the rest.
Although the graph captures the headline information well, there's
a couple of other subtleties I should mention.
Although the trio of Subversion, git, and Mercurial cluster close
together on approval, git does get a notably higher amount of best
scores: (65 versus 20 and 33).
VSS got the most "dangerous" responses, but a couple of people
approved of it.
Neither TFS or ClearCase are liked much, but ClearCase got more
"dangerous" responses than TFS (41 versus 22).
Some caveats. This is a survey of opinion of ThoughtWorkers who
follow our internal software development discussion list, nothing more. It's
possible some of them may have been biased by my previous article
(although unlikely, since I've never managed to get my ThoughtBot
opinion-control software to work reliably). Opinions of tools are
often colored by processes that are more about the organization than
the tool itself. But despite these, I think it's an interesting data
point.
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