Report on Recognition

Earlier this year I embarked on a journey to investigate how we could improve participation in the Mozilla QA community. I was growing concerned that we were failing in one key component of a vibrant community: recognition.

Before I could began, I needed to better understand Mozilla QA’s recognition story. To this end I published a survey to get anonymous feedback and today, I’d like to share some of that feedback.

Profile of Participants #

The first question I asked was intended to profile the respondents in terms of how long they’d been involved with Mozilla and whether they were still contributing.

This revealed that we have a larger proportion of contributors who’ve been involved for more than a couple of years. I think what this indicates we need to be doing a better job of developing long-term relationships with new contributors.

When asked which projects contributors identified with, 100% of respondents identified as being volunteers with the Firefox QA team. The remaining teams breakdown fairly evenly between 11% and 33%. I think this indicates most people are contributing to more than one team, and that teams at the lower end of the scale have an excellent opportunity for growth.

Recognizing Recognition #

The rest of the questions were focused more on evaluating the forms of recognition we’ve employed in the past.

When looking at how we’ve recognized contributors it’s good to see that everyone is being recognized in some form or another, in many cases receiving multiple forms of recognition. However I suspect the results are somewhat skewed (ie. people who haven’t been recognized are probably long gone and did not respond to the survey). In spite of that, it appears that seemingly simple things, like being thanked in a meeting, are well below what I’d expect to see.

When looking at the impact of being recognized, it seems that more people found recognition to be nice but not necessarily a motivation for continuing to contribute. 44% found recognition to be either ineffective or very ineffective while 33% found it to be either effective or very effective. This could point to a couple of different factors, either our forms of recognition are not compelling or people are motivated by the work itself. I don’t have a good answer here so it’s probably worth following up.

What did we learn? #

After all said and done, here is what I learned from doing this survey.

1. We need to be focused on building long-term relationships. Helping people through their first year and making sure people don’t get lost long-term.
2. Most people are contributing to multiple projects. We should have a framework in place that facilitates contribution (and recognition of contribution) across QA. Teams with less participation can then scale more quickly.
3. We need to be more proactive in our recognition, especially in its simplest form. There is literally no excuse for not thanking someone for work done.
4. People like to be thanked for their work but it isn’t necessarily a definitive motivator for participation. We need to learn more about what drives individuals and make sure we provide them whatever they need to stay motivated.
5. Recognition is not as well “baked-in” to QA as it is with other teams — we should work with these teams to improve recognition within QA and across Mozilla.
6. Contributors find testing to be difficult due to inadequate description of how to test. In some cases, people spend considerable amounts of time and energy figuring out what and how to test, presenting a huge hurdle to newcomers in particular. We should make sure contribution opportunities are clearly documented so that anyone can get involved.
7. We should be engaging with Mozilla Reps to build a better, more regional network of QA contributors, beginning with giving local leaders the opportunity to lead.

Next Steps #

In closing, I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to share their feedback. The survey remains open if you missed the opportunity. I’m hoping this blog post will help kickstart a conversation about improving recognition of contributions to Mozilla QA. In particular, making progress toward solving some of the lessons learned.

As always, I welcome comments and questions. Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!