Bad Rules

I’ve written blogs discussing incentives, and will probably write more in the future. One of my classic stories was how a Test Manager stated she was judging Testers if they run 10 Test Cases a day. Some people just ran 10 then chilled out for the rest of the day even though they would have normally done more work than this. Others tried to run as many as they could, but they ignored the harder Test Cases and ones that depend on 3rd parties. So:

A) it looked like we were nearly complete because the number of remaining test cases were low, but this last batch took ages to run so was very misleading.

B) We discovered that 3rd Party API/Test Systems were down at the last minute.

So this incentive actually helped delay our releases.

I’ve been watching a lot of Andrew Platt’s videos recently. He has many channels but this one he just reads stories from Reddit. It’s basically very low-value and easy YouTube content to make 😀

The stories he did on Rules made me laugh. It’s a similar concept to incentives; you are trying to change people’s behaviour by rewards/punishments, but if they aren’t well-thought out, then they backfire.

Here’s a few notes on my favourite punishments from the video:

• If you’re a minute late that’s half a point, if you’re up to 4 hours late that’s half a point. So if you are gonna be late, may as well delay more.

• Death penalty for stealing sheep. Welshmen caught stealing sheep would claim to be making love to them because the penalty for bestiality was lower.

• Day care started charging a small fine for parents who picked their children late. This caused more late pick-ups. Could be that parents didn’t feel as guilty because it didn’t seem as much of an inconvenience. Also, it’s cheap childcare.

• Bus drivers got banned from wearing shorts – so they all wore skirts instead.

• Cobras were killed for a bounty in order to reduce the population. Enterprising people bred cobras to cash-in the bounty. When the reward system was scrapped, the cobras were set free, increasing the cobra population.

• “Dry Counties” banned drinking. People would drive further away to drink, causing an increase in drunk driving.

• Mandatory to drop heating temperatures to save on electricity. People brought their own heaters which increased electric use.

• “Clean Desk” Policy caused people to put all their paperwork in an envelope and place it in the Internal Mail. It would arrive on their desks the next morning.

• Dominos deliver pizza within 30 mins or it will be free. This increased car crashes as the drivers would drive recklessly to get there on time.

• Only giving smokers breaktime; rewarding smokers.