Development teams are becoming more virtual, transient, and distributed. The lack of colocation makes it challenging to experience much of the cohesion benefits that come from positive reinforcement in intrateam interactions. The increasing instability in team membership makes it difficult to establish and maintain a team culture, shared identity, and the expectations for individual practices and habits that make up the less talked about, but vitally important component of a development process. Trends like Kanban, Continuous Deployment, and DevOps are driving an intense focus on cycle time and are driving out traditional cushions in schedules and team performance variability. All of this makes it very challenging for team leaders and stakeholders to keep a pulse on how a project is progressing qualitatively.

Game Mechanics, while not a panacea, is a strong contender for filling the void being created by the structural changes taking place in development organizations. Let’s examine the applicability of some of the more common game mechanic constructs:

• Badges allow for both feedback on behavior mastery and reenforces team culture and shared values. 
• Voting with titles creates a durable system of record for accomplishments and contribution and externalizes inter team dynamics. 
• Leaderboards provide a consistent level of intensity and motivation and focuses team members by personalizing their contributions to shared team goals and key metrics. 
• Game results become an interesting form of project reporting that provides unique quantitative insight into a range of qualitative questions. Savvy development managers often glean great insight from simply walking around and observing her team. Energy levels, momentum, engagement, and confidence in deliverables and dates are just a few of the qualitative insights this can yield. When your team is distributed, this key source of knowledge is gone. Game results and trends provide an interesting surrogate. 
• Game results operate as a form of institutional memory providing consistency in the face of changing personalities on an unstable team. At a team level, they provide new members with a quick (but deep) understanding of acceptable performance levels and team values. It also acts as a form of personal reputation, allowing a new team member to quickly understand the strengths of her new coworkers. 
• Game results provide a rapid feedback loop for an individual to understand how their recent performance and individual behaviors align to the ideal. This is perhaps the most powerful aspect of game mechanics. Reviews and other HR concepts rarely create desired changes because they occur to infrequently to be used in habit creation or behavior modification and have too much overloaded importance for honest discourse (read compensation and promotion). Code reviews and peer feedback, while valuable is focused in the result of individual behavior (the code, defects, functional issues, etc) not the actual behaviors, actions, and practices of the individuals themselves. 

While game mechanics can provide some interesting benefits to agile teams, there are significant potential pitfalls. The value of game mechanics increases as a function of the quality of the specific defined mechanics. Poorly thought out game mechanics can have dramatically negative effects. There is a temptation to tie extrinsic rewards to game results. Anyone who thinks this is a good idea, should read the great research and arguments in Dan Pink’s book Drive (in fact, anyone thinking of embarking in a game mechanics experiment should read this book). In this same vein, while e competitive effects of game mechanics can boost team performance for short periods, game mechanics should be positioned and nurtured as a mirror for intrinsic motivation and provide a rapid feedback loop for an individual to assess their behaviors and performance against team culture and goals.