JiraHero! Real-time Retrospective

Are you the JiraHero of your team? Communicate with your team, help others and take the challenge to win some great awards!

Inspiration and solution

Complex projects and large teams can cause a lot of stress. Increasing workload and complexity make it difficult to see the actual progress and team members communicate problems too late. All of this causes frustration and stress, which can lead to delays and even burnouts.

During the Devs Unleashed Hackathon 2023 we used Atlassian’s powerful Forge to develop JiraHero: Realtime Retrospective. An app that gives insight into project status, promotes communication and brings people together as a team in a playful way.

Welcome to JiraHero, an unexplored island that houses marvelous wonders but also great perils! Exploring this island will be no easy task but uncovering its secrets will be worth it! Will your team take up the adventure to form an exploration party and map the entire island?

JiraHero provides insight into the project’s status, challenges of individual team members and their vitality. Using the fast and easy Atlassian Forge, each chosen sprint progress is visualized by a route across the island with the points of interest representing user stories and issues. Discover unexplored areas by completing user stories and issues, but don’t fall behind on the tour guide!

JiraHero connects team members and makes working together the main focus. Create a quest to let your team members know you need help. Quests immediately show up in the Jira board and on the JiraHero Island.

JiraHero promotes communication and an open environment by letting team members give an impression of their mood each day. Team members can communicate their mood during the day by assigning a grade to how they feel, picking a representative emoji and writing a short description. This is a conversation starter for addressing problems.

To give the team something to work towards and further strengthen cooperation, JiraHero offers the option to set goals and rewards. For example, the scrum master will bring cake or karaoke for the whole team if a goal is reached. JiraHero uses story points from issues in a Jira board to create a score. This score can be used to set goals for teams to reach. When the amount of user stories in the Jira board is completed, the goal is reached, and the reward can be claimed.

Exercise and vitality are important aspects of a healthy and stress-free work environment. This is why JiraHero can be linked to Google Fit, to integrate real-time health data into the project status. Team members fill up a health bar during the day by doing at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise, as recommended by the World Health Organization.

To motivate the team even more, team members can unlock badges for achievements. These can be for example: helping a lot of team members by solving quests, earning the most points in a sprint or building up a streak of exercising days. Each new sprint the scoreboard resets and there is a new chance to be a winner.

How we built it

The JiraHero app uses the Atlassian Forge npm package. This package is used to make the JiraHero app for the Atlassian ecosystem. This package allowed us to use the Atlassian authentication system. This is used in the entire app to verify users.

In this project, we decided to use Typescript. This is because we prefer typesafe code. This is more secure than standard JavaScript and less prone to mistakes.

Our goal was to create a system where you have a scoreboard, a map which shows your current sprint and much more. To create the map, we used the Jira Software Cloud REST API. We made multiple API requests to receive the specific data to fill the map.

To keep track of the score we decided to set up a custom Database. The database type we decided to use was a Forge storage database. This stores all the score data for users and all the other data our app requires such as Goals, Moods and Quests.

Our app is also connected to the Google Fit API. We can make a request to the Google API by going to a custom page that connects the data. We can then make requests for people's fitness data.

For the frontend, we used the default template from Atlassian Forge. More specifically, we used the setup with React. This allowed us to create a router system which is used across the entire app to render different pages. With this system, we were able to create an interactive web application.

Challenges we ran into

By far our biggest challenge was the time it took to make JiraHero completely work. We have added big features to our app and all the graphics are made by our team. It was a big challenge to make it the best possible app we can make. Also we talked with organisations and startups to discover their problems and test the product in different iterations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are immensely proud of the energy that we put in this project and the final results. The first reactions are great, and we are getting a lot of compliments from small and big companies that they really want to try out JiraHero.

What we learned

We learned to work with Atlassian Forge, how to make a connection with Google Fit and we learned working effectively with a new, dynamic, and remote team.

What's next for JiraHero

During the project, Mama Productions from the Netherlands and Wavy Health, Inc. from the USA worked together to bring JiraHero to the next level. Mama Productions is a creative company and Wavy Health, Inc. is focusing on healthcare solutions to improve mental health. Wavy Health, Inc. is working on a medical device to empower the mental health of heart patients. In August 2022, Wavy Health was one of the winners from the Mission Daybreak challenge from the Veterans Affairs to develop solutions to improve mental health and prevent suicide. From the 1371 applications they made it in the top 40. With JiraHero, both companies want to support the mental health of employees. "I have seen to many burnouts by the development process, because their was a lack of engagement." Steve Thijssen

In JiraHero we already build the integration with Google Fit. During our interviews with companies, we got feedback that they would like to stimulate employees health. "It will be fun to use wearable/smartphone to create some fun competition, whereby employees will be stimulate to do some health exercises." Daryl Autar (AI engineer)

The next step for JiraHero is to connect the Thyrve API. Wavy Health build already this integration in the medical device app, whereby it support over 200 wearables. This knowledge will be use to also create the connecting in JiraHero. Also we will create more island, to create a world of JiraHero.