How Well Are We Doing?

During the spring of 2019, we conducted surveys of the "known" ASCOM application developers and device developers. The ASCOM Camera interface was excluded since this entire area is in a state of flux due to the introduction of CMOS detectors. The technology and the requirements are evolving rapidly. The objectives of the surveys were to:

1. Learn whether the current ASCOM Standard interfaces are sufficient to meet developers' needs for routine observing usage.
2. Learn if they had any comments for us that may not have already been communicated via the ASCOM Talk Developer's Forum.
3. Learn how well our ASCOM Alpaca technology is being accepted and where it is being used.

Invitations were sent once a month for three months to 50 known ASCOM developers. The invited developers are those who provide applications and/or devices to multiple users, either commercially or via an open source project with a significant membership. Individuals who develop personal programs and drivers were not included as many of these people are also inexperienced/beginner programmers and do not have separate non-technical users to provide feedback. The response rate of 48% was quite good compared to a typical survey response.

SUMMARY RESULTS

The results were quite positive and we learned where we need to focus more. Here are a few key overall statistics with comments:

• 83% say that the existing ASCOM APIs cover all of their operational/routine-use needs (this is the fundamental design goal of the ASCOM interfaces)
• 100% of the device developers see ASCOM interfaces taking them into the future (the question was not asked of application developers).
• 30% say that they have a need to provide special bypass of the ASCOM interfaces for routine usage. We need to look at this and to see if these needs are being covered by the existing Actions/SupportedActions feature of all ASCOM interfaces. About a third of developers said they have special Actions specific to their device. We need to find out of these bypass functions are needed for routine usage.
• 88% say they are aware of the ASCOM Alpaca technology.
• 75% Say they favor ASCOM Alpaca sharing the same abstract interfaces as COM-based ASCOM.
• 67% say they either have already incorporated, or will incorporate, ASCOM Alpaca into their application or device. Two popular Linux/Mac planetarium programs already incorporate ASCOM Alpaca.

DETAILED STATISTICAL SURVEY RESULTS

2019 ASCOM Application Developer Satisfaction Survey (67k PDF)

2019 ASCOM Device Developer Satisfaction Survey (70k PDF)