4 ms·

> how often a critical detail gets left out of a ticket description. This is why I require all discussion of issues to start, and remain in, the tracker.

• doubled112 4y ago
  It drives me up the wall when we open a ticket, it remains without updates, but communications end up spread between email, Slack, some meeting we had six months ago and a letter sent by messenger pigeon to a coworker three provinces over. Put it in the ticket. That’s why we have the ticket.
  • FridgeSeal 4y ago
    Yeah but then the person opening the ticket would have to go to _effort_ to actually usefully describe the issue, document the decisions etc and we couldn’t have that. Much better to write a ticket with a vague headings only, assign it to someone and ablate responsibility for everything else to some other person. /s
    • doubled112 4y ago
      They shouldn't need to work to do their jobs!
• repple 4y ago
  Ideally yes, but in reality it’s hard to keep synchronous conversation via a tracker which is usually not a real time chat. Usually it’s important to clarify reported issues vs whether it was correctly understood right away.
  • nomel 4y ago
    > which is usually not a real time chat. Usually it’s important to clarify reported issues vs whether it was correctly understood right away. The summary/title of issues can be edited, as needed, and clarifying summary comments can be made. But you're right, it's not exactly the same. People with language barriers sometimes struggle with "not real time" conversations. Others feel if they're writing something in an issue tracker, it's somehow special, so they have to be incredibly formal, and are afraid to be wrong, ask questions, etc. Some people who are great at speaking are terrible at "slower" forms of communication. I think this does limit those types of people, if you completely close off chat.
• lmm 4y ago
  How do you determine whether a discussion is going to turn to an issue? Do you hold all conversations in the tracker just in case?
  • nomel 4y ago
    > a discussion is going to turn to an issue Generally, if it's not an issue, we wouldn't be talking about it. If they're asking a question, it becomes pretty obvious within the first few statements if it's an issue or not, even if it's one about missing documentation.
• zmmmmm 4y ago
  if really enforce this then I'm curious how you maintain high quality of discussion in there. Slack for me is like an explicit outlet for all the low-quality peripheral discussion that causes problems or confusion if it ends up in the ticket itself. There's definitely a question of discipline in ensuring that info ends up back in the ticket, but it usually just comes down to finishing up the slack conversation with "Can you update the ticket with this?" and they copy the useful parts, put a link to the discussion thread if it's useful and we're done.
  • nomel 4y ago
    > maintain high quality of discussion in there. Why is this a requirement? You have low quality discussion, in the ether, or you have somewhat constrained discussion, in the issue tracker. You can always "to summarize the above", but if you forget, it still exists where you can find it. At least it's somewhere topically relevant. Our issue tracker lets us edit other peoples comments. This is nice for linking statements/questions to other issues.