

GitHub Survivor: a bug leaderboard for GitHub issues - harto
http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2013/01/05/github-survivor/

======
kurrent
How do you address that somebody could take on 5 bugs that take 5 minutes to
fix versus the guy who takes the 1 bug that takes 5 hours to fix?

~~~
harto
Good question! We currently track that externally. E.g. in the issue
description we might say "This is worth 100 whisky-points". It would be cool
to build in a notion of value.

------
carbocation
When designing systems that reward bugfixes, beware the Cobra effect. [1]

[1] = <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect>

~~~
harto
On the other hand, it's an incentive for devs to log and fix minor issues they
might've otherwise ignored.

~~~
watt
If you start measuring some metric, the team will adapt at improving that
metric, but inevitably this will spill out into distorting or lowering
performance in some other aspect. So as you point out, such survivor board
might make team focus on fixing trivial/easy issues, but the issues requiring
big time investment might go unfixed (as it would make 10 trivial issues pile
up while you fix 1 old hard ticket - which will make you look bad).

Just make sure this is what you want.

~~~
lvh
This is anecdotal evidence, but this hasn't happened in over 2 years of having
this thing[1] at Twisted[2]. People understand it's fun and games, and it is
not the true measure of success. Real success, including bringing in old/hard
tickets, doing release management... etc is very much celebrated, even if it's
not visible on the board.

Another comment that has been made here is that you shouldn't have giant
monstro-tickets: they should be split up wherever possible. Clearly that's not
possible in every case, but the point is that monstro-tickets aught to be the
rare case.

[1]: <https://twistedmatrix.com/highscores/>

[2]: <https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/>

------
decklin
Before reading the article, I hoped this was going to have something to do
with the oldest issues (open, fixed recently, commented, etc) across all of
GitHub. Does such a thing exist?

------
sergiotapia
I love this idea! Makes me wish we could implement something like this where I
work. But I always remember that we're a business first, and software
development office second. :(

Edit: Meaning, we don't sell software, but we need software to run our day to
day.

~~~
dlutzy
1\. git clone <https://github.com/99designs/githubsurvivor.git> 2\. profit

:-)

------
lvh
Twisted created one of these a good long while ago[1], and then someone
adapted it for Github[2]. This one looks very fancy though :)

[1]: <https://twistedmatrix.com/highscores/> [2]:
<https://github.com/leereilly/github-high-scores/>, also
<https://github.com/kans/highscores>

~~~
harto
Wow, very similar style. I don't think we were aware of those!

------
jjbohn
This is really cool. Definitely want to implement someone like this with my
teams.

------
lox
How embarrassing, I guess I'd better close some bugs.

------
lucian303
I can't think of a more worthless and demoralizing idea. Not all bugs are
created equal, thus the measure is inaccurate.

~~~
richo
Noones treating this as a definitive source of truth. It's a fun way to gamify
our bug squashing efforts.

