Code review gamification

[pozorvlak]

Here's a daft idea I had last night, on which I'd appreciate feedback:

Suppose your project struggles to get code reviews done in a timely or thorough fashion¹. It might be possible to improve matters by making code review into a game: you score points for every bug you find, for suggesting successful solutions, or for completing your code review quickly. More points for finding subtler bugs, submitting working patches or completing reviews extra-quickly. At the end of the month award prizes (or perhaps just bragging rights) to whoever's amassed the most Code Review Points.

Has anyone tried this? Has anyone got any good ideas for (semi-)automating the system? Does anyone think it's a terrible idea? If so, why?

¹ You are doing code reviews, right? :-)

Comments

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

It's also important to look at how many people use the application. I can't find a source right now, but one of the Microsoft blogs basically said "If there's a one-in-a-million bug then it will show up every day for one of our customers".

[neoanjou.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure a friend of mine must have read the same blog as he was telling me about something very similar.

Statistics can be fascinating - I assume you've heard of Littlewood's Law:

'Littlewood defines a miracle as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million. He assumes that during the hours in which a human is awake and alert, a human will experience one event per second, which may be either exceptional or unexceptional (for instance, seeing the computer screen, the keyboard, the mouse, this article, etc.). Additionally, Littlewood supposes that a human is alert for about eight hours per day.

As a result a human will in 35 days have experienced under these suppositions about one million events. Accepting this definition of a miracle, one can be expected to observe one miraculous occurrence within the passing of every 35 consecutive days – and therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.'

Sadly with bugs, one experiences the opposite :-)