The design and testing of questionnaire routing can be expensive and error-prone. Current methods and tools for questionnaire design focus heavily on skip patterns for routing respondents throughout surveys. Previous research from the Australian Bureau of Statistics has shown this design strategy to error-prone and minimises the ability for researchers to rigorously test the correctness of routing during without extensive manual effort. The ability to design questionnaire routing in an automated fashion with the ability to see live updates of changes to surveys would aid in the production and delivery of error-free surveys for social science.

The Canard Question Module Editor is a cross-platform open-source tool with a rich user interface for the design of structured questionnaires. Its three panel design allows researchers to build survey routing logic, edit metadata and see a final reproduction of a survey side-by-side in real time. By focusing on questionnaire metadata and logic it allows researchers to design and describe the structure of questionnaires in a format that can aid in the delivery of multi-modal surveys. This is achieved through a complex plug-in architecture that allows for lossless conversion into the ACSPRI queXML format and the corresponding LimeSurvey delivery engine, as well as the Data Documentation Initiative archival and registry formats.