I agree we should give recognition and encouragement to devs, but I think
there are other ways to do it we could think about besides sheer number of
commits, +2s or lines modified.
I personally think that rewarding high numbers encourages quantity over
quality (only big numbers are recognized) and also encourages a culture of
hero developers[1] that is discouraging for casual or new volunteers and
grows our silos bigger.
I, for example, value better good -1 code reviews (well written,
thoughtful, and when you learn new things), rather than 10s of +2s, and for
example IMO a reviewer price would be hand picked from nominations for this
kind of reviews rather than automatically picked from top number of +2s.
[1]: There's always a small group of *heroes* that are highly productive
because -besides them being great developers- of the background knowledge,
familiarity with the code bases and other developers that are always going
to be in the top of most these metrics.
On Apr 4, 2016 5:22 PM, "Niklas Laxström" <niklas.laxstrom(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
2016-04-04 17:02 GMT+03:00 Quim Gil
<qgil(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
The first question to answer is what information
are you looking for when
you want to measure developers' "productivity". What would be the
motivation of that estimation? What is the motivation behind this thread?
One reason comes to me mind. My gut feeling is that we are not very
good at consistently giving recognition for technical work. One
possible reason is that we do not have clear and understandable
metrics or promote those metrics enough. Nor am I aware of any process
for awards and celebration (The Academy Awards would be an example in
another context, also Wikipedian of the year).
As an example, I recall vaguely that during the Bugzilla times we used
to have regular emails on wikitech-l with list of people who closed
most bugs.
Having some metrics for different activities could stir up some
healthy competition (also unhealthy if we are not careful) and of
course there is a lot of important work that is not visible from the
numbers only.
I am not expert on this subject, but I think developers (especially
volunteers, but also others) are more likely to stick around if they
feel that their work is recognized and appreciated. For the latter we
already know that we should improve our code review process.
-Niklas
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