The Problem with JIRA Tickets? You Can’t Recognize Topics and Patterns

Unless you put somebody in charge of managing JIRA tickets rather than just shifting them?around.

“Let me create a JIRA ticket for this.”

In my role as product owner of Yonder, that’s the most dreaded sentence in my daily work.

Why?

We use JIRA not just for development work, but for all sorts of other work in the company. So there are lots of people who create JIRA tickets.

Here is what can go wrong.

1. Duplicate Tickets

Creating a ticket in JIRA is easy. That’s a good thing, but it’s also a bad thing. People create tickets without thinking twice if a ticket is needed. Here are some examples:

• It’s easy to automatically create a JIRA bug ticket from any service desk software you might use. So if two of your customers report the same issue, you’ll easily end up with two duplicate tickets?—?often with different titles and different problem descriptions. How on earth should your product and development teams ever plan their sprints like this?
• People write placeholder tickets just to make sure they don’t forget about something. More often than not, those tickets consist just of a title, plus maybe a screenshot or a copy-pasted error message. Guys, that’s not a ticket. Nobody will be able to understand what needs to be done down the road. Especially if those tickets aren’t assigned to one of the next sprints, but stay in backlog forever.
• We use several JIRA projects: One for mobile development, one for DevOps, one for customer projects, and so on. Very often, people create a ticket in one of those JIRA projects, not realizing that there is already another ticket in another project that would cover the issue. And what does JIRA do? They offer a feature to link tickets, with technical relationship names such as “is duplicated by”, “will solve”, or “covers”.
• Last but not least, many tickets are written just to fend off work from your plate and assign it to somebody else. However, often it would be faster and more efficient to just do the work yourself instead of investing the time to write a ticket.

2. Ill-Written Tickets

In JIRA’s description field, you have all the formatting options you could ever imagine, without the 1990s clipart from Microsoft Office.?

Tables, colors, strike-through text, embedded files.

Often ticket descriptions grow over time, as people do not dare to overwrite descriptions somebody else has written. Then you have descriptions that say something like “see my comments below in blue”, or descriptions with 80% of the text in strike-through. All because people don’t know that the ticket history tab contains all the changes a JIRA ticket ever experienced, including the update of the description field.

Less is more. Have the courage to simplify ticket descriptions, reformulate wordings, and overwrite outdated information.

3. Unassigned Tickets

A ticket is like a work order in a car repair shop. You need to assign it to a mechanic who fixes your car and define a time when you will pick up the car.

In the JIRA world, this means tickets need to be assigned to people, projects, epics, and sprints. Unassigned tickets get lost in the ticket graveyard. When there are unassigned tickets in the ticket graveyard, somebody will create a duplicate ticket. Back to square 1.

What does it take to fix the?problem?

Is JIRA to blame for all those problems? Hell, no. It’s the same with any ticketing system. Ticketing systems need somebody who is in charge. It’s not enough to write and assign tickets, somebody needs to be in charge and manage the tickets.?

From my experience, managing the tickets involves the following tasks:

• Group tickets to recognize patterns. In this way, you can identify the important topics, rather than just working through tickets.
• Reformulate ticket descriptions to match the recognized patterns, and set duplicate and outdated tickets to obsolete.
• Prioritize the important topics for the next sprints, and assign the work to people with the right knowledge and skills.

Sounds over-simplified? Not at all. It’s not hard, it just needs somebody who takes the ownership. And taking ownership includes going through the backlog of all tickets regularly?—?I do this every day.

I’m not alone. It’s common knowledge that at Apple, there are regular ticket review meetings with high-ranked executives. It looks like also for one of the largest tech companies on the planet, somebody needs to take ownership of open tickets.

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