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Quantitative Survey: Hardware Release Gates & KiCad Review Workflow

Goal: Quantify release pain points, CI adoption barriers, and willingness to pay among professional KiCad engineering teams. Target Sample Size: N = 50–100 respondents across hardware startups, mid-market IoT, and robotics firms.

1. Survey Metadata & Hypotheses

  • Primary Hypothesis: > 65% of hardware teams experience at least one fabrication re-spin per year caused by avoidable BOM, footprint, or export synchronization errors.
  • Secondary Hypothesis: > 80% of teams using GitHub for KiCad want automated PR change impact summaries without uploading design files to third-party clouds.

2. Survey Questions

Section 1: Demographics & Tech Stack

  1. What is your primary role?
  2. [ ] Electrical Engineer / Hardware Designer
  3. [ ] Hardware Engineering Manager / Director
  4. [ ] Embedded Systems / Firmware Engineer
  5. [ ] PCB Layout Specialist

  6. [ ] Other: ______

  7. How many active hardware engineers are on your team?

  8. [ ] 1–2
  9. [ ] 3–10
  10. [ ] 11–25

  11. [ ] 26+

  12. Which KiCad version(s) do you actively use in production?

  13. [ ] KiCad 9
  14. [ ] KiCad 8
  15. [ ] KiCad 7 or older

  16. [ ] KiCad Nightly / v10 development

  17. Where do you host and version-control your hardware repositories?

  18. [ ] GitHub (Cloud / Enterprise)
  19. [ ] GitLab (Cloud / Self-hosted)
  20. [ ] Bitbucket
  21. [ ] Local Git / Network drives only

Section 2: Review Workflow & Release Pain

  1. How does your team review hardware pull requests or commits today? (Select all that apply)
  2. [ ] Manual visual inspection in KiCad desktop
  3. [ ] Screenshots pasted into PR comments
  4. [ ] PDF schematic diffs / manual exports
  5. [ ] Automated CI checks (DRC / ERC scripts)

  6. [ ] We do not perform formal PR reviews for hardware

  7. In the past 12 months, how many board fabrication re-spins did your team experience?

  8. [ ] 0
  9. [ ] 1–2
  10. [ ] 3–5

  11. [ ] 6+

  12. What was the primary root cause of your most expensive hardware defect?

  13. [ ] Incorrect or missing BOM Part Number (MPN)
  14. [ ] Footprint pinout or polarity mismatch
  15. [ ] Fabrication output mismatch (stale Gerbers / Drill / CPL)
  16. [ ] Mechanical / board outline clearance issue
  17. [ ] Firmware/Hardware pin assignment conflict
  18. [ ] Other: ______

Section 3: Value Proposition & Pricing

  1. If an automated GitHub Action could analyze every KiCad PR and report exactly what changed with risk indicators, how valuable would this be?
  2. [ ] Essential / Must-have
  3. [ ] Very useful
  4. [ ] Nice to have

  5. [ ] Not useful

  6. What is your organization's stance on uploading hardware design files (schematics/PCBs) to third-party cloud SaaS?

  7. [ ] Strictly forbidden (requires 100% local/self-hosted processing)
  8. [ ] Discouraged / requires infosec approval
  9. [ ] Allowed if SOC 2 / GDPR compliant

  10. [ ] No restrictions

  11. What pricing model would your team prefer for a hardware release gate?

    • [ ] Free open-source core CLI + paid team collaboration features ($20–$50/seat/month)
    • [ ] Flat organization license ($250–$1,000/year)
    • [ ] Pay-per-manufactured board release
    • [ ] Free open-source only