"Closing the rings" for work. The Apple Watch motivates me to achieve activity goals, can the same be done for work goals?

Goals

When I deploy more often, I have a greater sense of achievement. I change my thinking to "what is the smallest thing I can do towards my goal?". I also know that I can help my collegues by reviewing their changes faster.

I like to improve a habit of making frequent small changes and quick reviews while having fun doing it. Having the data visible and an automated coach can help me to nugde my behavior in the right direction.

The book Accelerate The Science of Lean Software and DevOps describes deploy frequency as one of the key measures for software delivery performance.

Non goals

• No controlling: There are tools that build statistics of teams on how they perform. This is not a tool for this use-case. To avoid misuse, data is stored locally only.

Habits

Apple Watch uses 3 goals: stand, exercise and move. By focusing on these lead metrics, lag metric like overall health improves. What to use in a work context?

• collaborate: PRs reviewed
• deliver: PRs merged
• maintain: PR merged that fixes an error, improves performance or code quality

Goals are daily and specific. I can set for example these goals:

• collaborate: 4 PRs reviewed (2 x of PRs merged because at work every PR needs 2 reviews)
• deliver: 2 PRs merged
• maintain: 1 "maintenance" PR merged

Metrics

Next to the goals Apple Watch shows additional metrics like total steps, total distance and flights climbed.
For work these metrics can be interesting to see:

• Avg time to PR review
• Avg time to PR merge

Motivation

To build a habit, it's important to stay engaged. Apple Watch uses three options to keep motivated.

Awards

When reaching personal bests or milestones , awards can be received. For example: "200% of deliver goal reached".

"If you make your deliver goal for the next 2 you achieve a new best streak".

Coaching

In the evening: "you're so close to closing your collaborate ring. One more review should do it."

Sharing

Encourage colleagues to participate or challenge each other. Gain points based on the percentage of activity rings closed.

Questions

• Documentation and "thinking" is also a delivery, how to measure that?
• Dependabot PRs are easy wins, is that an issue? It's review, merge and maintenance. Automerge when green?

Inspiration

• Picnic
• Apple Watch: Close your rings
• Rings in CSS codepen

#published