"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.
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 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.
For some reason rather than helping developers it is getting in the way.
I'll put an option to disable notification for people who don't care! Good idea.
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).
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 ...
Looks very polished, how long did it take? Good luck in Codegeist!
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.
In my first, the markup was littered with urls looking like
http://www.domain.com/path/to/stylesheet.css?v=20
And I was a little happier inside.
That's gamification, but unintended.
Making it part of the product? I'm not sure.
Not sure how successful they've been though.
Link: http://playnice.ly/
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.
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.
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.