Survey results are in!

Big thanks to all of you who completed our developer survey last month.  We got over 60 responses and we appreciate the thoughtful and detailed responses.

Our top 5 requests were:

1. The biggest request involves the review queue and the time it takes to get out of the sandbox. (24 requests)
2. There is a real need for better documentation. (22 requests)
3. Tutorials are scattered across the internet and are often out of date.  (21 requests)
4. The IDE’s/tools for writing and debugging extensions could be better.  (15 requests)
5. A few developers really want some sort of marketplace for extensions. (6 requests)

These are all great responses and we’re very aware in particular of the need to improve the sandbox as well as provide a central place for all documentation and tutorials related to addons.

With each release, we’re making small improvements to make the sandbox process better, with the goal of planning and implementing larger improvements in parallel.  For instance, in this latest release, we’ve added a feature that automatically notifies editors when an add-on they’ve reviewed gets changed, thus making sure that the right attention goes to add-on developers who are responding to a rejection.  In the future, we’re looking at creating audit tools that developers can use to scan their add-ons for common problems that trigger rejections, and providing greater transparency into the queue so you can get a sense of when you can expect a review to happen.

For documentation and tutorials, we’re looking at creating a sister site to AMO that caters to both new and experienced developers.  This site will highlight the best of what the community has to offer in addition to providing community features that help connect developers to each other.  The goal isn’t to replace the existing developer resources, but to centralize and highlight content and information in a way only an add-ons specific site can. We’re incredibly excited about what we’re tentatively calling Developer.AMO and we feel it will do a lot to address the issues around documentation and support that developers have voiced.

Finally, some of you have asked about a marketplace for add-ons.  This is something we’d like to hear more about, as it’s something we haven’t made any decisions on and would like to hear your thoughts on what you’d like to see and how you think it would work.

While I listed the top 5 responses, we got lots of other feedback that we’re taking to heart.  Here are the anonymized results, let us know if there’s anything on there that you think needs more attention.

As for next steps, we’re planning a session where you can come visit us in person in Mountain View or virtually via air.mozilla to talk about what you’d like to see from us in 2009 and beyond.  This will happen some time in April, and we’ll give you plenty of advance notice so that you can attend. 🙂