
Show HN: What if JIRA (Atlassian Bug tracker) had Achievements? - madgnome
https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/42092
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scrrr
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
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
"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
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

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programminggeek
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
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
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 ...

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pufuwozu
From an Atlassian employee, great job mate!

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

~~~
madgnome
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.

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dsl
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
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.

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scorchin
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/>

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joeld42
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.

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pvh
Achievement Unlocked: Switched to Pivotal (80GP)

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mikle
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.

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omouse
You should read this:
[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6366/persuasive_games_...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6366/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php?page=1)
and see what you think about gameification afterwards.

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daniel_levine
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.

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

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

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

------
leon_
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.

