Gamify Developer Productivity - An Experiment In The Making

“Development is as much an art as it is science” – or at least that’s what I used to think but going by the rapid advancements and increasing sophistication of today’s A.I. Code Assistants (Github CoPilot etc) its heavily tilting towards the latter. Actually, the boundary between Art and Science itself is becoming blurry given the capabilities of Generative A.I.

However, the fact remains that long before Generative A.I and Github CoPilot Codex’s, all of us involved in delivering software have been looking for ways to juice up the pace of delivery. And to the extent that development still has some human element left (still a large percentage in reality), why not look at leveraging the same principles that Marketeer’s use of gaming buyer behavior, by offering incentives and rewards to developers in a similar fashion to incentivize them to be more productive or exhibit desirable traits.

Marketeers use precise triggers in buyer behavior to decide whom to reward by how much etc., in other words metrics and analytics, to guide them in setting up rules for their Loyalty/Rewards programs. This got me thinking, as we worked on creating and expanding PepsiCo’s own Rewards Engine, that is used to power our B2B and now also D2C engagement experiences, why not use this as part of the development process itself?

The next part was deciding on the metrics to use to measure developer productivity - things like code commits, code reviews etc., are obvious. We started off on this journey by manually tracking some of these metrics, but that was not going to be a sustainable and scalable approach. Fortunately, we extensively use Azure DevOps (ADO) for all our development, and a lot of these metrics can easily be obtained via their API’s. ?

We configured our Rewards Engine with some Levels (or Badges) like Bronze, Silver, Gold etc., each requiring a specific set of points to achieve, and all the ADO activities identified earlier each earned some points towards getting your next Badge. The best part is the developers don’t have to do anything outside their regular work to earn the points. As they rack up points, the developers earn earn these badges and more importantly the respect of their peers while contributing to healthy team performance. We can also easily create Tasks in ADO with special tags that automatically show up on our board for anyone to earn extra points - like say code refactoring or solving slow API Responses etc.

This product, that we internally have branded as “CodeKarma” can also be rolled out across the wider org, and allow for objectively measuring cross-team performance as well. We can even quickly setup multiple Orgs and each Org can have multiple teams, and a developer can be part of multiple teams.

This is an experiment in the making of course, I don’t know if and how it will impact our development velocity going forward, but the hope is that it will have a positive impact to team performance by creating a healthy spirit of competition and provide developers a sense of achievement for doing their jobs well.?In time it may even provide a good way to measure both team and org health via objective metrics.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are mine alone and do not reflect those of my employer.