[core-workflow] Tracker workflow proposal

[Ezio Melotti]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 2:51 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Apr 2014 07:06:53 +0300
> Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I'll also suggest another related (and "controversial") idea.  People
>> like to reach goals: if they address the 3 issues in their queue they
>> have reached the "empty queue" goal.  Addressing 3 of the 5 issues
>> isn't quite the same thing.
>> I've seen this concept being exploited in three main ways:
>>   1) badges/trophies/achievements;
>>   2) competitions;
>>   3) streaks;
> [...]
>>
>> While I understand that probably most of the core devs would be
>> against similar things, this might motivate new users and make them
>> "addicted" to the tracker, while making their experience more
>> enjoyable, and the example I linked show that similar things exist
>> even in these environments (and not only on the micro-transaction
>> based smartphone games :).  People who don't care about this
>> (different people are more or less competitive) could just ignore it.
>> OTOH this might have a negative side-effect if users start closing
>> issues randomly just to get the "100 closed issues" badge, but this is
>> not difficult to avoid.
>
> Not difficult how? In any gamification system, people will work towards
> getting new rewards / awards, not towards making meaningful
> contributions.

By having badges/trophies that are not easily abused.
For example having "Submit 10 patches in one day" is unrealistic and
will likely push whoever wants to get this to either hold off his
patches and submit them at once or to produce 10 poor-quality patches.
Having "Triage 100 issues" is less prone to abusing IMHO, because even
if someone is doing some extra work to try to reach the goal, I don't
think this will affect the quality of the work.

> I think something like the Twisted high scores is acceptable (since it's
> quite un-serious), but starting displaying awards will really bias how
> people contribute (with a definite emphasis on quantity over quality,
> IMO).
>

Note that I'm not suggesting this to be a pervasive thing.  On the
tracker, badges should be relegated to a specific page and won't be
visible elsewhere.  Users will be able to check their badges and the
badges of other devs and there might be a leaderboard page showing who
has the most badges or something similar.  We can also include a
section in the weekly report that says something like "Congratulations
to: John Smith for contributed his 100th patch, Jane Smith who triaged
50 issues, etc.", but that's pretty much it.

If you want to make it less game-like, we could turn this into a more
"serious" user stats page (and a global stats for the "leaderboard"
page) showing user activity, number of issues they
opened/closed/triaged/commented on/assigned to, patches contributed,
patches accepted.  Adding graphs and deltas with the previous
week/month/year, or with the average/best contributor might add
motivation and replace to some extent the need for badges, but it's
also less appealing (at least for some people).  Ohloh has similar
stats/graphs (that we could maybe embed).

> (it's the same reason I'm rather ambiguous on the whole idea of
> sprints)
>
> I think trying to ensure we actually *thank* people goes a long way
> towards achieving the same goal, but without the bias.
>

The two are not mutually exclusive :)

> Regards
>
> Antoine.
>