Last month GNOME had a Bug Squash Month. Thanks to everyone who participated!

For this initiative I had prototyped a way to gamify things up a bit. I created a high score table and badges for the local open source groups joining in on the bug squashing. I had my own group Open Source Aalborg participating on November the 30th and we had lots of fun!

Open Source Aalborg in the process of bug squashing (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

What made bug squashing a particularly good activity for my local group was the it sets no requirement to do actual coding. I did a small presentation about bug squashing and afterwards everyone could participate regardless of background. Our award system with the badges even meant each could individually set their goal and how much effort to put into it. Want something easy? Look out for obvious obsolete bugs. Want something harder? Try to code up a patch.

Installing Fedora to build run the latest GNOME Apps and reproduce bugs (CC-BY-SA 4.0).

As participants worked out the bug reports, I was keeping the high score table up to date. A projector would then show off the high score table so everyone would know whenever we achieved a new badge.

Small physical rewards in the form of candy to everyone participating (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

As another experiment, I had made actual physical rewards for the participants consisting of candy and buiscuits. When participants managed to squash their first bug they would get something, and when our group managed to get 5 bugs squashed I would give out snacks to everyone. Fun small addition and I particularly liked the idea of rewards to everybody when we as a group met a goal. It reinforces the team spirit!

Some thoughts about what worked and what didnt work:

• Badges which the event manager can manage live at the event happens also work the best.
• It varies a lot how much each local group achieves in quantity. I think making badges based on other measurements works best (fx. Spooky Skeleton Award was fun!).
• Our social media awards were awesome!
• Good to have share a step by step guide after presentation so people can get started quickly.

I’m definitely up for getting another high score table up and running again for another bug squash sometime. There has been talk in #engagement about making a web app a bit like the Capture the flag websites for these kind of things. Would definitely be cool!

And thanks a lot Alexandre for taking an initative on this!