Categorizing and tagging tickets is a crucial skill for quality assurance (QA) professionals. It helps you prioritize, organize, and communicate issues effectively and efficiently. In this article, you will learn how to categorize and tag tickets for optimal QA performance using some best practices and examples.
Categorizing and tagging tickets helps you to sort and filter issues based on their type, severity, status, and other criteria. This way, you can easily identify the most urgent, important, and relevant tickets for your QA goals. Categorizing and tagging tickets also helps you to communicate clearly and consistently with your team members, developers, and stakeholders. You can use categories and tags to assign responsibilities, track progress, and report results.
Tickets categorization is the key step towards Analytics. As a QA you need to enable the team to drive decisions based on numbers. An atomic number is never useful, but categories will serve as clear indication to friction areas in product quality or development process.
Categorizing tickets means assigning them to predefined groups based on their characteristics, such as the product or feature they are related to, the type of issue they describe, the severity of the issue, and the status in the QA process. For example, you can categorize a ticket by its product or feature (e.g. login, dashboard, or payment), its issue type (e.g. bug, enhancement, or question), its severity (e.g. critical, major, minor, or trivial), and its status (e.g. new, in progress, resolved, or closed). You can use a ticketing system such as Jira, Trello, or Asana to create and manage such categories for your tickets; moreover, you can customize your categories according to your project needs and preferences.
You also need to categorize tickets by when they happened in the lifetime of the problem. This is important to drive Shift Left quality initiatives. Also categorize them by origin. For example, is it originated by poor documentation or missed requirement or bad design or test escape. This will help you improve the development process.
Tagging tickets is the process of adding keywords or labels to them that describe specific aspects or details of the issues. For instance, you can tag tickets according to source (e.g. user feedback, automated testing, or manual testing), environment (e.g. production, staging, or development), device (e.g. desktop, mobile, or tablet), and version (e.g. v1.0, v1.1, or v2.0). A ticketing system such as Jira, Trello, or Asana can be used to create and apply tags to your tickets, as well as to create custom tags tailored to your project needs and preferences.
Tagging tickets involves adding keywords or labels that describe specific aspects or details of the issues. This helps in categorizing and organizing the tickets based on different criteria such as source (e.g., use-r feedback, automated te-sting, manual testing), environment (e-.g., production, staging, development), de-vice (e.g., desktop, mobile-, tablet), and version (e.g., v1.0, v1.1, v2.0). Platforms like Jira, Trello, or Asana can be used to create and apply tags to your tickets. Additionally, you can also create custom tags tailored to your project's nee-ds and preference-s.
Using categories and tags effectively means following some best practices and guidelines to ensure consistency, clarity, and accuracy. For example, you should use clear and descriptive names for your categories and tags that are easy to understand and remember. Additionally, consistent and standardized formats should be used, such as capitalization, punctuation, and abbreviations. It is also important to use relevant and appropriate categories and tags for each ticket that reflect the nature and context of the issue. Moreover, a limited number of categories and tags should be used to avoid duplication, confusion, and clutter. Finally, filters and reports can be used to analyze and visualize your tickets based on their categories and tags.
Ticket tracking systems like JIRA offer many ways to track tickets, however you need to put in time to establish a baseline for how you name or sort these methods. Epics, summary formatting, filters, etc. Avoid making insider-knowledge specific tags and formats. It's better for comprehension, if your system for categorization information can be understood by anyone who sees it.
Improving your categorizing and tagging skills requires learning from experience and feedback, as well as adapting to project changes and challenges. It is important to review tickets regularly and evaluate how well your categories and tags serve QA objectives. Seeking feedback from team members, developers, and stakeholders on how they use and perceive your categories and tags is also important. As your project evolves, you should update and refine your categories and tags, while also learning from other QA professionals and experts on how they categorize and tag tickets. Utilizing the right tools and techniques can be beneficial as well.