This is the first article in the short series of articles meant for copilots - ‘Making challenge specifications better qualitatively’.
The goal of this series and this article is to ensure that the best practices in writing quality specifications are adopted consistently and widely, and all the copilots are on the same page in terms of the parameters they should ideally look to optimise.
Overall Objectives - Although it might come across as obvious that the objective of a challenge specification is to communicate the challenge requirements to the potential participants, it helps to be aware of all the not-so-obvious outcomes that can be directly influenced by the quality of the challenge specification.
The following are some of the outcomes that are tacitly influenced by the quality of a specification:
Increases Overall Community Engagement - A specification of good quality makes the challenge more approachable and hence increases participation. Apart from getting better submissions (discussed below), this also increases the number of participants in each challenge. If the quality of a large number of the challenges improves significantly, this directly leads to greater community engagement overall - which is one of Topcoder’s important goals.
Induces better winning submissions and hence is good for the client - Because of the increase in participation, the number of submissions also generally increases. Statistically, this leads to better winning submissions, because the probability of getting a close to perfect submission increases with the number of submissions. Furthermore, a specification of good quality also enables participants to understand the challenge well, which arguably improves most submissions to some extent, effectively increasing the average submission quality in any challenge. Overall, a good quality submission helps deliver better outcomes for the client.
Improves members’ experience and better utilises their time - A specification of good quality saves members’ time, as less time is spent trying to figure out the goal of the challenge, and importantly, not a lot of time is unnecessarily and inefficiently wasted in the forums looking for clarifications. The members can then choose to employ this extra time in any manner they might like – be it having a bit more time for their family or some hobby or even using the additional time on other challenges, which might also need their expertise.
Improvement of members’ experience along with better utilisation of their time is an extremely important outcome that gets frequently overlooked. One of the goals of this document is to ensure that appropriate attention is paid to this outcome, and community members’ time and effort is treated with more respect.
In the subsequent articles of this mini-series, we’ll delve deeper into the expected outcomes discussed above, with particular attention to the last outcome, i.e. improving the overall challenge experience at Topcoder for the members. Stay Tuned!
Scroll down to see the next articles in this series.