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Question #3: How Used?

How often do you run Valgrind skins over your project(s)? Describe how you do this, eg. manually, automatically with scripts, etc.

Another badly worded question. I split the responses into two parts, "how often" and "how run". I had to categorise responses myself, so they're only rough. Lots of people gave more than one answer, which is fair enough; each answer is included. However, I preferred event-based answers over time-based answers (eg. if they said "every time my program breaks, which is about once a day" I would categorise it as "when a bug occurs" rather than "often".) The meaning of the time periods (often/sometimes, etc) wasn't at all scientific... once a day would probably be "often", once a week would be "sometimes". Sometimes I used their words, sometimes I interpreted.

How often?

Event-based
  all the time:                         1
  almost always:                        1
  often:                               17
  sometimes:                           25
  irregularly:                          7
  a few times:                          1
  rarely:                               1
Period-based
  when a bug occurs/suspected:         42
  before releases:                     19
  on big changes:                       9
  Calltree/KCachegrind when I'm bored:  2
  on every change:                      1
  when optimising:                      1

Most common is easily when a bug occurs/is suspected. No stunning insights here.

One comment that didn't come up in the survey, but is relevant -- some people ask users that have problems to run Valgrind, in case it finds anything. Some of these users are non-programmers, and they tend to find Valgrind hard to run. So we can't assume that all users are developers.

Nb: "all the time" -- someone described an existing program that dies normally, but runs ok under Valgrind, so that's what they do!

How run?

No clear definition of "manually"... some people might do it directly from the command line, or via a script (to avoid long command lines).

in automated testing:     13
manually:                103  
via script/makefile:      11

So not a lot of automated use, although a few people said they are planning to integrate Valgrind use into automatic testing in the future.

Other answers:

no answer:                                         1
misunderstood question (confusion about "skins"):  1
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