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I feel this in my bones, and have been trying to get engineering managers to work with their teams on creating better tickets because in a company of nearly a t
by dvtrn 6y ago
I feel this in my bones, and have been trying to get engineering managers to work with their teams on creating better tickets because in a company of nearly a two hundred developers including a massive overseas contingent, but a painfully understaffed ops and infrastructure team of 3:
“My build doesn’t work, please prioritize”
Does not help me help you. I wish I were making it up that this is the level of detail with which people ask my team to stop what they are doing and render aid (we don’t, when it’s that bare). These are developers who you’d think would know how to flesh out an error ticket and at least be somewhat specific in what they’re asking for.
What build? What repo is the build pipeline attached to? What’s the error message (many of the times these were errors that could have been self-solved if the developer bothered read the error message to notice they forgot to close a bracket. I’ve pointed to this to their leads. It doesn’t change) Do you know how many developers are using the pipelines we’ve build for them? Do you realize how many development initiatives are going on? I’d hope so, we Go over then as a tech division with a regular cadence. What product are you working on? Which feature branch? How about so much as a screenshot or a link to the repo where the build is failing?
So. What I’ve done is gone to all of their engineering leads, showed them examples of the ticket. Explained my problem. And told them “if your people can’t help us enough by being descriptive and at least putting a link to the build with the error they’re seeing, it’s not getting prioritized it won’t even be triaged”
- nelsondev 6y agoWe had this problem of poorly phrased tickets, and we added a rule to our ticketing software to immediately respond with a list of questions they need to answer to prove they did due diligence before we would start answering. It worked, we got less tickets, and the ones that answered the questions we could resolve faster.
- dvtrn 6y agoI proposed something similar to our Jira Admin, since I lack the privileges to just do it and ask permission later: we need certain form fields to be "required" to cut down on that back and forth. Even put together a bit of a workflow in a project that I have "Project Lead" status on to show him how it could be done, if Issue Type is this, change the view and make these fields required. That was...9 months ago. I'm still waiting for it. Side effect of everyone being too busy I guess, which is a chronic problem at org.