On Ticket Management

Published on September 17, 2024, filed under and (RSS feed for all categories).

Issue tracking tools like Jira, GitHub Issues, or Bugzilla are essential for managing bugs and tasks (that is, issues). However, not everyone finds ticket management convenient or convincing. While some developers try to get by only doing minimal ticket work, others manage to get more out of them.

While there’s a line until work with tickets becomes excessive, tickets are crucial for team support and management. I like to use this post to share my view on why tickets matter, how to manage them effectively, and what a healthy issue management culture can look like.

Why Tickets Matter

Tickets provide an overview of our workload and help us prioritize tasks. Centralizing this information in an issue tracker eliminates the need for searching in multiple places, and simplifies work (re)assignment.

Establishing guidelines for ticket handling is essential for consistent practices within our teams and organizations. Tickets also offer less obvious benefits, such as identifying time-consuming tasks and areas of individual and team strengths. (This is what I like to focus on in particular, to check on useful data points.)

Best Practices for Ticket Management

Here are guidelines and principles that, from my experience, make ticket management both effective and efficient. They contain some assumptions (like work with OKR, or the existence of epics); if they don’t hold for you, customize or ignore them.

Ticket Creation

Ticket Information and Metadata

Ticket Maintenance

❧ While these guidelines may seem detailed, they establish a framework that should feel lighter in practice. Adopting and fine-tuning it, it should allow you to anchor your team’s work, ensure visibility into it, and more efficiently produce results. (And yet, someone will still tell you they don’t like tickets đź™‚)

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About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on September 30, 2021.

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m a contributor to several web standards, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences. (Be critical, interpret charitably, and send feedback.)