BattleTickets

Choose your competitor
Choose the attribute
Finally, win
Fight!

Inspiration

Managing tickets is not necessarily the most thrilling part of a developers job and updating estimates and logging work can be seen as a chore. This is where BattleTickets comes in, with competition being the best motivator and providing a way to gamify Jira tickets.

What it does

BattleTickets is an application built to turn Jira tickets into gaming cards that simulate a card game. A few variables are taken into consideration, such as resolution time, and the fastest developer to resolve the ticket wins. The tickets are chosen randomly. The players do not compete against each other, but they compete against the system that chooses one ticket belonging to other players.

How we built it

We started creating a small API to get completed Jira Issues' information and the users of a project. Using the output to populate the data to be used for the Top Trumps alike cards on the game. Finally, we created the front-end elements to present the information and some basic functions to select opponents, attributes to battle with and game rules into the app.

Challenges we ran into

An initial challenge was approaching the Forge App development platform. The initial set-up presented some complications, such as the inability to give access to the app for other people to test it. It was also challenging trying to find the right balance in terms of how in depth we wanted to develop the application, given that we were developing it in a Hackathon context. The concept has huge potential, which we would like to take advantage of later down the line, but we knew we didn’t have the time and resources to achieve this in the short term. So we had to plan our mitigation policies in this respect.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we were able to use of JIRA’s Rest API to retrieve and present statistical information originally found within Jira tickets to the end user in a fun and interactive context. Holistically, we’re proud that we were able to come up with a concept for the application, plan how it will work and develop software that delivers the desired functionality. This seemed very daunting at the very beginning, so to be able to simply put our minds to something and develop it is something that will give us further confidence in the future to develop concepts and create bespoke applications from scratch.

What we learned

We gained more in-depth knowledge of the Atlassian REST API as well as the logic and structure to deploy cloud products using Forge. We learned the importance of planning and time management when it comes to developing software which are critical to the software development stages themselves.

What's next for BattleTickets

The next steps for BattleTickers are numerous, but can be summarised in the three main points:

1) We would like to develop the application into a multi-round game, whereby you iteratively play against your opponent using a different card each time; we could then play say 10 rounds, and declare the winner based on who won the most rounds. This could be a quick fire state of affairs where the user simply needs to click on their attribute of choice on the card in order to play the round and render the next set of cards.

2) We would like to store data to make a list of the winners. This functionality would provide greater insights to managers who will be able to track performances. They will be able to determine who the high-performing employees are and differentiate them from low-performing employees to reward those who always win and help those who need more guidance.

3) We would like to expand on the variables taken into consideration. At this time, BattleTickets only takes into consideration the time spent on a ticket. In future, we would like to use other variables such as number of subtasks as well as allow users to enter their own custom fields as variables.