Show HN: What if JIRA (Atlassian Bug tracker) had Achievements?

scrrr 15 years ago |

Although the implementation looks very good (congrats) I'd like to say on a general note:

"Gamification" of software can't possibly be the right thing to do. If you can't find gratification and satisfaction in contributing to a project as it is, e.g. by fixing annoyances, improving code-base, earning money, then what are you doing in that project anyway?

I already care zero about any Stack Exchange awards or HN-Karma, because I am an adult. Don't treat me like a child.

mikle 15 years ago | |

I'm a developer. My time spent with Jira is an annoyance at best, or a hatred at worst. I can't change that. It's a good tool for our QA and PMs.

Something like this is nice to distract me. I don't think that gamification is equivalent to treating you like a child.

> "Gamification" of software can't possibly be the right thing to do

I don't think you are qualified to make this decision for the rest of the world. If this is not for you, just don't use it. The fact is that Gamification is interesting and it's too soon to pass judgment on it.

mironathetin 15 years ago | | |

"I'm a developer. My time spent with Jira is an annoyance at best, or a hatred at worst."

I support that. Jira is a feature monster. It is aimed at producing nice pie charts, percentage numbers and lists (of solved, unsolved, analyzed etc. problems). A nice toy for managers. These are probably the people who make the buy decision, so it was clever to aim jiras features at this group instead of bothering with developers needs.

Gamification of jira may simply add more entertainment options. Not a bad thing, because the less these type of managers interfere with developers work through jira, the more useful code can be written.

I could easily image to give a character to every logged-in developer and let them run through charts or hop around in bug lists. The managers may virtually shoot at them with rocket launchers or laser blasters. Not bad. Go on.

The time is not far when I don't take a job anymore because the project uses jira.

farkas 15 years ago | | |

Hey! I was the founder / developer that wrote the stats system for JIRA, and I'm quite proud of that code! :)

But I'm worried as I've read a few people on this thread say that JIRA is made for managers and not for developers. As the guy who was here from the beginning - I can say that it is definitely true that we made JIRA target managers - we found that too many people using Bugzilla spent all their time reporting status upwards, and if we could automate this, then developers could spend more time coding, and less time reporting.

But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be a great experience for developers. As someone who longs for the day that I can spend 10 hours coding (I'm now co-CEO, so I don't get to code as much anymore), I want JIRA to rock for this use-case.

But I'd love your feedback on where we need to improve. What is the 'inner loop' of JIRA usage for yourself? What functions do you do 20 times a day that we should make lightening fast?

I'd also love to know which version you are using. We've made some serious speed improvements in the last 12 months, as well as introducing keyboard shortcuts for the most common actions, so you can get around much faster than you used to. In JIRA versions >4.1 press '?' to get a list of shortcuts. My favourite is '.' when you are viewing an issue.

But seriously - would love your feedback. Or email me: scott@atlassian.com

X-Istence 15 years ago | | |

Yeah, we use JIRA at work, and I tend to avoid it like the plague. It takes forever and a day to load, and doing simple tasks takes upwards of 5 - 6 clicks to get done.

For some reason rather than helping developers it is getting in the way.

Strom 15 years ago | |

Gamification makes things more fun and I like to have fun even though I am an adult.

madgnome 15 years ago | |

I think you are right, gamification is not the answer for everything and everyone. Some people care about rewards and stuff and some, like you, don't.

I'll put an option to disable notification for people who don't care! Good idea.

programminggeek 15 years ago |

Funny enough I've long thought about building achievements into an issue tracker like JIRA, like since 3 years ago, but clearly I'm too lazy or I would have done it first.

Anyhow, even though JIRA is incredibly well made software I still tend to dislike it on a daily basis. Achievements might make it little more palatable, but that still doesn't fix the overall feel of JIRA for me.

It's shiny, but it's also bloated with features that I don't care about and some things that are there seem half baked (like time tracking if you need it).

X-Istence 15 years ago | |

Someone else mentioned it already, but JIRA seemed to have been made for management to look at pretty pie charts and graphs that ultimately don't mean a whole lot if your developers are more pissed at it and don't really use it other than the bare minimum.

X-Istence 15 years ago |

My co-worker would absolutely love this. He is the gamer type, has to get every achievement in every game ever. Good guy, but clearly driven by badges and the like.

Thing is, it is within JIRA, besides the guy that installs and maintains JIRA none of the developers in the company like JIRA. It is slow, flashy, and doing basic tasks takes too many mouse clicks. This has meant that our developers spend as little time within JIRA as possible, meaning that the quality of the items in JIRA goes down. It is strictly an enter hours, close bug report type deal. No discussion is held within JIRA on the best way to fix a bug (done in private email instead or in-person meetings) or feature requests that don't properly get split up into sub-tasks.

Not that I am saying that Bugzilla would be any better for that matter, but at least it would load within a reasonable amount of time ...

pufuwozu 15 years ago |

From an Atlassian employee, great job mate!

Looks very polished, how long did it take? Good luck in Codegeist!

madgnome 15 years ago | |

Thanks a lot! I've started less than a month ago (first commit April 13, 2011) and I work on it in evenings and weekend.

dsl 15 years ago |

If I buy a shitty game for the Xbox, do I sweat getting all the achievements I can? No. I return the game or toss it on a shelf and play a different one.

JIRA is that super shitty game that your girlfriend bought you, and you are going to get in trouble if you don't log a minimum number of hours of playtime. All the achievements in the world won't make it suck less.

johncoltrane 15 years ago |

When you work on a Facebook app, you need to customize the urls of your scripts and stylesheets to bypass their aggressive caching.

In my first, the markup was littered with urls looking like

    http://www.domain.com/path/to/stylesheet.css?v=20

After a couple of projects I noticed that the number was decreasing. As I was learning to work with their fucked-up FBML/FBJS/weird-corner-cases my code went through less and less iterations and the final numbers were lower and lower.

And I was a little happier inside.

That's gamification, but unintended.

Making it part of the product? I'm not sure.

scorchin 15 years ago |

PlayNice.ly, a London-based startup has made gamification of bug/project tracking a core part of their product.

Not sure how successful they've been though.

Link: http://playnice.ly/

joeld42 15 years ago |

This feels pretty patronizing to me. But I think it's just your choice of "cheevos". I guess I feel like you shouldn't need to earn achievements just for doing your job.

But putting some gamification into a bug tracker is a good idea. For example, some kind of score/currency system that QA could spend to adjust priorities and put "bounties" on their favorite bugs, and programmers could "earn" by fixing those.

pvh 15 years ago |

Achievement Unlocked: Switched to Pivotal (80GP)

mikle 15 years ago |

I'll try and get the team to agree to try it out after the weekend. I love the idea of gamification, if it's done right.

What is really interesting is how to take gamification further. Achievements are cute as a first step, but I'm sure there is a lot of progress to be made in making a workplace's tedious tasks (like shuffling bugs in Jira) interesting.

omouse 15 years ago |

You should read this: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6366/persuasive_games_... and see what you think about gameification afterwards.

daniel_levine 15 years ago |

I think "gamification" is mostly just creating an often complementary incentive system for something. As a result gamification itself can't really be wrong, only its execution and I think this sounds pretty lightweight and well done.

madgnome 15 years ago |

A video is available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-T53xP6SIM

andrewstuart 15 years ago |

I went to a website the other day and the moment I arrived I got a "newbie" badge. Sigh.

chrisjsmith 15 years ago |

Just looks like another way of patronising professionals (and another plugin to wrestle with administering in JIRA).

leon_ 15 years ago |

So where's the Epic Loot plugin? ;)

I personally don't get anything from gamification - but I know people who love collecting achievements and badges. So that plugin is a nice addon for them them I guess. And as long as it's optional I don't have any problems with that.