In September a customer emailed me about the feature their team likes most in my Jira app. Toasts are short thank-you notes that teammates send each other, and this team had turned them into "a jokey bargaining tool for my group: 'I'll do that jira if you toast me!'"
The same email also showed me that I had switched Toasts off by default, which is not the kind of thing you want to learn from a customer.
Some background, in case you haven't seen the app. The oldest advice on the internet is "don't feed the troll", and Feed The Troll asks your whole team to do the opposite: everyone gets a 16x16 pixel troll that eats their Jira work (time logs, status changes, flagged blockers, comments), and the trolls live together in a Team Village, one page the whole team shares.
I build it on my own. My troll is called Tosteris, which is Latvian for toaster. Yes, a toaster, in a story about Toasts. Tosteris is a Backlog Baron, one of 15 lineages, and that says something about my backlog.
A Team Village filling up. I work alone, so this crowd of 40 comes from a test mode I built to fake a team. The village and the teammates in these clips are demo data.
The skeptics have a point
In a 2022 thread, Gamification experience on Jira, Nic Brough wrote that Jira's basic reporting already shows who is getting things done, and "there's not a lot in an issue tracker you would want to push people to do". Under another gamification app's announcement here, the sharpest comment asked whether points for using Jira would just teach people to create issues.
As far as volume goes, I agree with both of them, because nobody needs a troll to close more tickets, and a game that pays for volume turns into a second velocity chart that nobody asked for.
Nic's other point in that thread is the one I agree with most: where gamification had helped, it helped with maintenance and housekeeping. You probably know the Jira version of that. Time gets logged on Friday from memory, statuses trail the real work by a couple of days, a blocker comes up in standup and never makes it into Jira, and some ticket has been In Progress since last month.
If you've ever chased people for worklogs, you're in good company: one of the most-read articles in App Central, with more than 200,000 views, is a guide to seeing how much time each person logged. I've been on the other side of that too. I couldn't make myself log time, because nothing ever happened after I did.
So the XP goes to housekeeping:
- time logged on the day the work happened: 1.5x
- a blocker flagged on an issue that already has a comment explaining it: 2x
- a comment on an issue assigned to someone else: 1.5x
- an issue moved to Done: 2x, or 2.5x when it was created 30 or more days earlier
Time logged the usual way. Tosteris eats it and levels up.
Creating issues earns nothing
The app doesn't listen for issue creation at all, so one issue typed by hand and 500 imported from a spreadsheet are worth the same: zero.
Everything that does earn XP has a daily cap and a cooldown:
- time logs: four a day, at most one an hour
- status changes: eight a day
- blocker flags: three a day
- comments: six a day
Six worklogs typed in one go pay for one. Moving an issue back a column isn't penalised, because teams do that all the time for good reasons.
When someone hits a cap, nothing on the screen says so. I chose the silence on purpose, since a visible "3 of 4" turns into a target, and people are very good at hitting targets.
The feature I got wrong three times
The first mistake was the reward. A received Toast paid a flat 25 XP with no daily limit, while everything else in the app had a cap, so the friendliest feature in the whole game was the one a popular teammate could farm. In August I cut it to 10 XP, five times a day. After the fifth the Toast still arrives, it just stops paying.
The second one is the customer's email. In the Team Village, the Send a Toast button checked whether a teammate kept their XP and streak private, and both start private, so on a brand new team nobody could be toasted there at all. Hiding your numbers says nothing about whether you want to be thanked. Since September the button asks one question only: does this person accept Toasts?
The same email suggested switching settings like these on by default. Toasts and showing up in the village already were on. Streak and XP I kept hidden, because turning them on would have shown existing users' numbers on their next page load, without asking them first.
The third one turned up in my own audit at the end of September. The limits counted per project, and since a Team Village can combine several projects, a village of five projects allowed five times as many Toasts. Now they count across the whole village.
Three fixes for one small feature. Tosteris took every one of them personally.
Sending a Toast from a teammate's card. Both people earn XP.
The leaderboard starts off
Put a leaderboard in a work tool and people will read it as a ranking of people, whatever you meant it to be. This forum has both reactions in one thread. Under the Kudos program announcement, one member asked for Kudos inside Jira ("that would be so lovely"), and another asked how to switch Kudos off: "I don't need to see how I stack up against anyone else nor how I'm in 1000000th place."
The first person would probably like Toasts. The defaults are for the second: a new Team Village starts with its leaderboard off.
Streak and total XP are hidden from teammates by default, the troll and its level are visible, and each person can change the rest from the Gear tab of their My Troll panel. If your site wants no competition at all, Harmony Mode switches off leaderboards, the activity feed and Toasts everywhere, and the rest of the game keeps running.
Streaks pause while you're away, so a week of holiday costs nothing. The worst that can happen to an idle troll is that it falls asleep after three days, and any activity wakes it up again.
The Gear tab. Streak and XP start switched off, and Allow Toasts is the one switch the Toast button checks now.
A troll on a customer's ticket
The same customer had hit a blocker earlier in the summer. Their Jira also has a customer portal, and people raising requests there could see the My Troll panel, which is an odd thing to meet when you only came to report a problem.
The fix uses a permission you already control. Set Who sees trolls to Only your team, and only people with Jira's View Development Tools permission will see trolls. The default is everyone who can see the issue, so nothing changes for sites that don't need it.
Site settings, with Who sees trolls open.
And a 20-second race
The Team Village also has a sign for Troll Sprint, a run of about 20 seconds where your troll jumps over bugs and card stacks. Everyone on the site gets the same track each day. Racing is opt-in; switch it on and you run against your teammates' ghosts, and meeting the day's goal time pays 10 XP once a day.
The day's goal time first, then a scripted run against Anna Troll's ghost.
Where it doesn't fit
If you're looking for a productivity number for management, this isn't it. Better to find that out here, before you install anything. The app has no write access to Jira, so it can't change issues, comments, worklogs or settings, and nobody sees a person's hidden stats, a Jira admin included.
All 15 lineages. Tosteris is the Backlog Baron, top right.
If you have a minute, I'd love two answers. If you tried gamification in Jira and dropped it, what made you drop it? And which Jira habit would you reward that isn't on my list? If your team has its own "I'll do that jira if you toast me", tell me that too. I read every reply.
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