Above are histograms that portray the number of Unidata email
responses for individual topics of support for a one year period
ending March 29, 2005. The histograms are arranged by yearly
activity averages with the highest on the left and lowest on the
right. Each quarter year within the period is depicted from oldest to
newest from left to right. The number of responses has been normalized
to weekly averages so that the support load over the various periods
can be easily compared.
Total support averaged 145 responses/week over the entire year; 143 for
the first quarter; 147 for the second quarter; 143 for the third
quarter; and 146 for the current quarter.
Comments
As expected LEAD support continued to grow markedly. Even so, the
LEAD numbers are a major underestimate of its activity since the
great majority of LEAD email transactions do not go through
User Support.
Support numbers for individual packages, groups, and lists can be seen in
full support statistics.
Some tentative conclusions
The total support provided by the UPC remains high. Overall support
activities are seasonally invariant in spite the fact that support for
analysis and display applications show seasonal variations.
Support required for the legacy visualization packages GEMPAK and McIDAS
continues to be substantial with GEMPAK leading the way as the most
widely distributed analysis application. The IDV support
load has grown substantially as more users adopt the package.
Support required for LDM, IDD, and data continues at a high level
and shows some variability throughout the year.
Support for netCDF remains high.
The overall higher numbers for outreach reflect inclusion of more
categories of support/outreach provided by Linda.
Taken as a whole, the support required for visualization packages
(GEMPAK, IDV, and McIDAS) is comparable to the support
related to data reception (LDM, IDD, noaaport).
Support for any package increases after a new version of the package is
made available.
NOTE
These numbers and conclusions should not be taken too literally, for
several reasons:
For some packages, multiple responses in the same thread may be
bundled into a single archived email. Other packages have each
response in a thread counted separately.
After a new release of software, there may be a flurry of the same
or similar questions, which can be answered in separate emails or in
a single mailing list posting.
This counts primarily support of end users and site administrators,
not developers. Support for other developers in projects such as
OPeNDAP/DODS, THREDDS, McIDAS, GEMPAK, and IDV requires significant
resources, but is difficult to assess.
Not all support records were indexable for this report. Given this,
the above numbers are an underestimate of the
actual support being provided by the UPC.
