Re:What is developer productivity and how to measure it?
by jbay808 on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @02:31PM
(#30518862)
It's very hard to align an explicit incentive scheme with the outcome that you actually want.
In this case, you'll get your features, but they very likely won't be bug-free. They'll probably be quite slow and fragile. They might not scale. They might not be well thought-out. They might break backwards compatibility, or break other features that your customers are already using.
In other words, why wouldn't a developer borrow limitless technical debt in order to claim the bounty as fast as possible and move on to their next bounty?
Re:What is developer productivity and how to measure it?
by marcinzm on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @02:53PM
(#30519125)
Especially since the developer will likely be at a new company or team in 1-2 years.
Re:What is developer productivity and how to measure it?
by astrobe_ on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @03:04PM
(#30519247)
Because I am talking about programmers, not about mercenary-developers.
Re:What is developer productivity and how to measure it?
by jbay808 on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @05:27PM
(#30520912)
Then what change in behaviour were you expecting your incentive scheme to result in?
Re:What is developer productivity and how to measure it?
by astrobe_ on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @01:09PM
(#30530568)
The "scheme" a) draws from gamification b) prevents the sometimes hostile reception of the use of metrics c) reinforces the feedback loop. Positive perception leads to positive behavior.
Re:What is developer productivity and how to measure it?
by bluefirebrand on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @03:55PM
(#30519886)
Of course. No true programmer would be motivated by reward to produce shoddy work.
Re:What is developer productivity and how to measure it?
by tonyedgecombe on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @07:36AM
(#30526652)
There is plenty of research that show extrinsic rewards don't really work that well, especially for intellectual endeavours.
On top of that you have the problem that now your developers will follow the set objectives to the letter even if it transpires that something else was required.
Bug bounties work, why wouldn't "feature bounties" also work?
You say you want those features, preferably bug-free, for this deadline. And there's $5K for the team if the objectives are met.
Then, your metrics problem boils down to how to impartially measure customer satisfaction, or how well the objectives are met (in some contexts, bugs are unavoidable etc.).
Metrics can still be important to help the team identify their problems (or rather, confirm that their intuitions about the problem). It's an optimization problem: measure first, then do something about the actual bottlenecks.
That said, some programmers are such nerds that more money is not the highest motivation. One can use some creativity here.