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The audience, experienced programmers all, were happy to hear someone speak so frankly about the absurd demands imposed on them by an uncomprehending, pointy-haired management. Emboldened by our support, the speaker continued confidently: "... and," he proclaimed, "developers don't like to do documentation, because it has no value for them." His listeners nodded enthusiastically, exchanging smiles and knowing glances. Yes, 'tis indeed so, you could hear them think. (Selic, 2009).

Developers do not like to write documentation. This phenomenon has names like "information exchange dilemma", (cf. Kimmerle and Cress, 2007) "free riding", "tragedy of commons" (Wikipedia), and probably others. Writing documentation has no value for the individual developer. From an individual developer's perspective, there are so many other, important and much more fun things to do than to spend time on writing down information that he already knows. However, such information is invaluable for other developers. It is the classical economic problem of public goods.

CollabReview is a web-based tool for the gamification of collaboratively written texts like source code or documentation (e.g. in wiki articles). It lets developers earn points for contributing to collaboratively written texts, and integrates those scores into sportive social games. It addresses the social dilemma with a bottom-up approach, slightly adjusting the potential contributors' personal payoff-matrix, and thereby motivating them to actively contribute.

The CollabReview prototype was developed during doctoral studies (see Prause, 2011) conducted at Fraunhofer FIT. During these studies, the software was validated and evaluated in various field experiments. Among its success stories are considerable improvements to contributions to a corporate wiki (Dencheva et al., 2011; Agaraj, 2012) or to the readability of source code in agile development teams. The prototype is provided here as is under the Apache license for you to experiment with. It would be great to hear about your experiences and opinions, and to help you getting started...

References

• Agaraj, H.: "Building an effective rewarding system based on reputation"
• Dencheva, S., Prause, C.R., Prinz, W.: "Dynamic self-moderation in a corporate wiki to improve participation and contribution quality", ECSCW, Springer, 2011
• Kimmerle, J. and Cress, U.: "Group Awareness and Self-Presentation in the Information-Exchange Dilemma: an Interactional Approach." In 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), International Society of the Learning Sciences, 2007, 370-378
• Prause, C.R.: "Reputation-based self-management of software process artifact quality in consortium research projects", 2011
• Selic, B.: "Agile Documentation, Anyone?," Software, IEEE, vol.26, no.6, pp.11-12, Nov.-Dec. 2009

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