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

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

#11

Post by 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.

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

#12

Post by 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).

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

#13

Post by 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.

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

#15

Post by madgnome »

scrrr wrote: post #6

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…

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.

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

#18

Post by X-Istence »

mikle wrote: post #8
scrrr wrote: post #6

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…

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 t…

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.

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

#19

Post by X-Istence »

programminggeek wrote: post #12

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 w…

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.

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

#20

Post by 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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