Yesterday I spent about 12 hours adding some features to PHPSurveyor, an open source web survey package. This is part of a research project of a friend of mine who, unfortunately, got stuck with some survey code that was... erm... inadequate.

The Plot Thickens...

The original plan was to extend the existing code, which seemed reasonable enough. Some moments investigating later, it started to seem less plausible. Finally I had someone else look at the code. I don't remember the exact response, but it had something to do with a 10' pole, so that settled that. *Insert movie clip of someone dragging a folder icon into a trash can*

Most commercial web survey packages are fairly pricey. They start at around $80-$150 for the standard ones, but those didn't have the features we needed. The packages that did were upwards of $5000. (Incidentally, I hear the 'original code' hadn't been much cheaper than that...) There were some packages with academic licenses, but they typically had strange requirements, such as 'citing' the software in any derived academic papers.

Short version: we decided to grab PHPSurveyor and slap on the extra feature we needed (i.e. that would be my job).

The Features

PHPSurveyor lacked an important feature. We had some scenario questions, where we wanted to have the participant rate three scenarios at a time, for a total of 8-12. These would be different for different participants, allowing us to cover a large number of permutations without having each participant answer > 100 questions

On top of that I was asked to make this a tournament-style set of questions. In other words, after the first round, the highest-ranked scenarios would be put together in new sets of three and ranked again.

Anyway... all of this is summarized in the top picture, which is a diagram I sent my friend to make absolutely sure I understood the setup. The small gray boxes represent scenarios; the blue boxes are pages in the survey. The red stuff is my design Rather than making significant changes to PHPSurveyor, I decided to just add some hooks and keep my own code as separate as possible. I also decided to prefix all my code with 'pete_,' which made for easy automated searching through PHPSurveyor's 4500 lines of messy code. Have a look at the second picture and try to find the part I added My 'contribution' to date is about 500 lines of code, or a little bit more than 10% of the entire thing. For comparison, the entire 'original code' was 900 lines...

The Conclusion

Bored yet? I actually enjoyed working on this particular feature, because it was a nice bite-sized little project. It was also a nice opportunity to do some Open Source Software evangelism. Over the next few months we'll see if it actually worked *crosses fingers*