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" <[email protected]> wrote: > 2016-04-04 17:02 GMT+03:00 Quim Gil <[email protected]>: > > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
