Michael de Raadt

How do you encourage developers to be more productive?

A few months ago, I was intrigued by a presentation by Dan Pink, an American public speaker. Here is a version of that presentation (and there are a few similar presentations around, including a TED talk).

In the presentation, Pink claims that extrinsic motivators, specifically financial incentives (bonuses, raises, promotions, stocks,…), can be counter-productive to the goal of encouraging workers in certain circumstances. In the presentation, Pink refers to studies at MIT, so I went searching for publications for these studies and found Ariely (2005) and Awasthi & Pratt (1990).

While people can be motivated by financial incentives, the studies found that financial incentives can reduce performance for tasks involving a cognitive component. Software development certainly involves cognitive tasks, in fact programming is about as cerebral as you can get.

So if money doesn’t work, what does? Pink’s thesis is that employees will be more productive when they have a sense of:

• autonomy,
• mastery and
• purpose.

Pink refers to cases at Atlassian and Google, where employees are reported (in the media) to receive many perks. I’ve been to Google, and while I did enjoy the free food, the work environment was certainly not anarchistic, in fact it seemed quite ordinary on the inside. What Pink emphasises is that these companies offer a degree of autonomy to their workers, that employees have the potential to develop professional masteries for their current job and for future jobs, and that employees are able to see a sense of purpose in what they do day-to-day.

Developer Incentives at Moodle?

Some aspects suggested by Dan Pink were already in place at Moodle, but some have been added or enhanced in recent months. I will describe how we offer a sense of autonomy, master and purpose to members of the STABLE team at Moodle (the devs who work on the existing releases of Moodle).

Autonomy

Apart from being a relatively relaxed working environment, there are some specific differences that may set Moodle apart from other development offices.

• Devs choose, set-up and maintain their own development environments. Code meets at the repository, but how it gets there is up to the developer.
• Using the Scrum framework, devs choose issues they will resolve from a prioritised backlog of issues. This ensures that the highest priority work gets done, but devs have a sense of ownership over, and responsibility for, the issues they choose.
• After every two sprints (sprints are typically three weeks long), devs have a week to work on a project of their own choosing. The projects have to benefit the Moodle community, but is open to interpretation by the developer. This means that one week out of every seven, the developer is completely autonomous.

Mastery

Mastery is an area we could be working more on, but there are a few initiatives in place at Moodle.

• Devs can nominate external training courses and are supported to attend.
• Devs nominate areas of interest in Moodle and are allowed to specialise in those areas.
• Devs receive in-house productivity training . There are also irregular presentations on development related topics related to the current focus of work (for example, in-code documentation writing, Web services, etc.)

Purpose

Purpose is something that Moodle has a lot of. Moodle allows many people to access education, some of whom would not be able to do so otherwise.

In saying that, it is easy to lose sight of that purpose when devs are focussed on lines of code while reading the grumbles of users on bug reports.

It is important t0 regularly remind developers that there is a community out there and they really appreciate the work devs are doing. We have, in the past, dragged devs to a Moodle Moot, where there is a lot of back-patting. We are hoping to do that again this year.

If you are a member of the community and wish to express your gratitude, please do so. Send me an email or post a message on the Moodle forums. It will really help.

Do these incentives work?

From my perspective, I would have to say “yes” – encouraging a sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose does help developers, their progress, as well as the general working environment. It’s hard to quantify the effect of making these aspects more obvious to developers, but I have noted some improvements since we have.

• Our turn-over of staff is low. The devs seem are content and passionate about their work, particularly when they have a chance to work on what they are interested in. This really helps avoid slacking off when it comes to doing “more of the same”; with sufficient variety, developers are quite happy to switch to unstructured work and then back to structured sprints again.
• General productivity is higher and being maintained. The number of issues being led through our process has increased and that is a good sign.
• The STABLE team is producing some significant contributions to Moodle, and not always in the same way. We had a very colourful show-and-tell session last Friday with some very excited developers (including devs from outside the STABLE team). Here are some examples of what was put on show…

An optimised view for the Gradebook (Rajesh Taneja)

There are a number of issues relating to the usability of the Moodle Gradebook, which can become unwieldy. With some simple modifications, the Gradebook becomes a much more usable space.

• See MDL-25544 for details.

Previews for Database activity uploads (Adrian Greeve)

Currently, uploading data into a Database Activity provides little feedback or control. Adding in a preview, with field matching, allows easier uploading.

• See MDL-37503 for details.

A Moodle development kit (MDK) (Frédéric Massart)

The MDK automates many regular dev tasks including Git operations, adding information to issues on the Moodle Tracker and automation of site instantiation and population with dummy data.

This project has been quite a collaborative effort and is still growing.

• Documentation is available on the Moodle Dev docs.
• The MDK can be accessed from Github.