5 ms·

Every dev I know has never liked any ticketing system. Maybe its psychological though, makes us feel like we work at a deli counter?

by matt_s 9y ago

hinkley 9y ago
Someone observed a very long time ago that you can only count on devs to put the information into the ticketing system that is useful for their day to day work. I've only had luck with management (analysis and planning) of ticketing systems when we treat this observation as law. Either you measure what you have the data to measure, or you convince the developers that maintaining some part of the data is useful to them on a daily basis. The third leg of that stool is realizing that graphs and trends are for asking better questions, not for making decisions. Everything else comes down to a weak appeal to ethics. The problem is that a lot of devs either have or think they have a richer sense of ethics (not necessarily better, but more considered) than the people who want the data. So these appeals come across as tone deaf.
lazyjones 9y ago
I wrote and used a minimalistic one to save me time: plain e-mails to people with "[t]" in the subject got put in a database, recipients got modified e-mails with URLs to a web interface in the body (in addition to the original e-mail). When the task was completed, you only needed to click on one link in the web interface (or in the e-mail) and the original sender would get a confirmation by e-mail (i.e. you didn't need to write that e-mail yourself). The web interface provided an overview of open tickets and statistics. Later, comments, re-assigning tickets, priorities and other stuff was added. This was used for > 10 years (for a few 10000 tickets) AFAIR until it got replaced by Jira. It worked well and was accepted (or so it seemed) because it didn't really interfere with the typical way of doing things till then (e-mails) and offered minimalistic features on top.

Every dev I know has never liked any ticketing system. Maybe its psychological though, makes us feel like we work at a deli counter?

by matt_s 9y ago

Every dev I know has never liked any ticketing system. Maybe its psychological though, makes us feel like we work at a deli counter?

hinkley 9y ago

Someone observed a very long time ago that you can only count on devs to put the information into the ticketing system that is useful for their day to day work. I've only had luck with management (analysis and planning) of ticketing systems when we treat this observation as law. Either you measure what you have the data to measure, or you convince the developers that maintaining some part of the data is useful to them on a daily basis. The third leg of that stool is realizing that graphs and trends are for asking better questions, not for making decisions. Everything else comes down to a weak appeal to ethics. The problem is that a lot of devs either have or think they have a richer sense of ethics (not necessarily better, but more considered) than the people who want the data. So these appeals come across as tone deaf.

lazyjones 9y ago

I wrote and used a minimalistic one to save me time: plain e-mails to people with "[t]" in the subject got put in a database, recipients got modified e-mails with URLs to a web interface in the body (in addition to the original e-mail). When the task was completed, you only needed to click on one link in the web interface (or in the e-mail) and the original sender would get a confirmation by e-mail (i.e. you didn't need to write that e-mail yourself). The web interface provided an overview of open tickets and statistics. Later, comments, re-assigning tickets, priorities and other stuff was added. This was used for > 10 years (for a few 10000 tickets) AFAIR until it got replaced by Jira. It worked well and was accepted (or so it seemed) because it didn't really interfere with the typical way of doing things till then (e-mails) and offered minimalistic features on top.