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.

"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.

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: [email protected]

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.

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

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.