Originally reported by crn.com.au. Primary source: Atlassian engineering blog post “How to gamify bug tracking” by Andrew Burleson.
The Problem: Jira as a Graveyard
Atlassian’s Statuspage team had a bug-tracking workflow that looked reasonable on paper but broke down in practice as the team grew. Bug reports moved from customer support to an escalation engineer (EE), who would either fix a data issue directly or hand it to a developer. Simple problems got solved; complex ones got filed in Jira — and stayed there.
As Senior Development Team Lead Andrew Burleson described it:
“‘Put it in Jira’ became code for ‘forget about it’, and since putting things in Jira didn’t feel valuable, people often didn’t bother, so a lot of good ideas or observations weren’t getting captured.”
— Andrew Burleson, Atlassian
The knock-on effects were significant:
- Customer support had to chase developers to get responses back to customers.
- Response times were unpredictable and inconsistent.
- Ad-hoc, peer-to-peer bug assignments interrupted mainline feature work.
- A growing backlog of unresolved issues created ongoing customer experience debt.
Three Principles to Rethink Support
Rather than simply adding more process on top of a broken system, the team established three foundational principles to guide their redesign:
- Communication beats speed. Not every bug can be fixed immediately, but timely, honest communication to customers throughout the resolution process is acceptable — and appreciated.
- Throttle the interrupt work. The flow of unexpected bugs and high-priority requests is unpredictable, but manageable. By understanding the long-term rate of incoming tickets and resolving them at the same rate or slightly faster, the backlog stops growing.
- Filter the noise ruthlessly. Much of the existing backlog was already resolved, no longer relevant, or out of scope for the product’s direction. Removing that noise made the real workload visible — and manageable.
The Gamification Fix: Poker Chips and Weekly Taxes
With sound principles in place, the team needed a mechanism that was simple, fair, and — crucially — engaging. Their solution was a gamified token economy built around physical poker chips.
How the System Works
- Each developer starts with two poker chips.
- Completing an “Overhead” ticket (a bug or support issue from the backlog) earns the developer additional chips.
- Every week, a tax is collected — typically one chip per developer.
- The tax rate is adjusted up or down to ensure the Overhead backlog drains at a controlled pace.
- Developers who have accumulated chips in reserve can pay the tax from their stockpile, buying themselves a week free from overhead work during crunch periods.
- Lighter weeks become an opportunity to tackle more overhead work and rebuild the stockpile.
Burleson explained the intent behind the design:
“By empowering developers to control their own schedules, we actually get more mainline and overhead work done, with less need for micro-management.”
— Andrew Burleson, Atlassian
Results: Fewer Forgotten Bugs, Happier Customers
After adopting the Overhead process, the Statuspage team reported several concrete improvements:
- The bug backlog was brought under control without derailing feature development.
- Issues are now triaged, assigned, and resolved at a regular, predictable cadence.
- More bugs — including higher-priority ones — are being fixed faster.
- Customer support no longer needs to babysit developers; every issue reaches a resolution and can be closed with the customer.
- Customers receive timely updates and realistic expectations, improving satisfaction even when a fix takes time.
“We’ve battle-tested it for several years, and now we’re happy to share it with other teams in hopes that others can benefit as much as we have.”
— Andrew Burleson, Atlassian
Key Takeaways for Engineering Teams
Atlassian’s approach offers practical lessons that apply beyond their specific toolset:
- Visibility matters more than volume. A backlog no one trusts is worse than no backlog at all. Auditing and pruning stale tickets is a legitimate, high-value engineering activity.
- Flow rate beats heroics. Sustainable bug resolution at a consistent pace outperforms occasional sprints of firefighting followed by long silences.
- Developer autonomy improves throughput. Giving engineers control over when they absorb interrupt work — rather than mandating it week-to-week — reduces resentment and increases actual output.
- Gamification works best when it is transparent and fair. The poker chip model is simple enough to understand immediately and gives every developer the same starting point and the same rules.
- Support and engineering alignment is a product quality issue. When customer support can reliably close the loop with customers, trust in the product improves independently of the bug fix rate.
Teams looking to replicate this approach do not need Statuspage or any specific Atlassian tool — the underlying principles of throttled intake, transparent prioritisation, and token-based developer autonomy can be adapted to any issue tracker or support workflow.