The ticket generator will save time



  • Some time ago we got bought out by a large conglomerate. We are now in the process of migrating our systems and procedures to work with theirs. One such task was to switch from our bug ticket system to theirs. Naturally their systems was far more encompassing than ours and so it's far more complicated to use.

    Some well-meaning developer decided that since creating new tickets was a painful task, he would write a script that runs under outlook that would scan incoming emails for <whatever> and if appropriate, generate and submit a ticket with all the relevant fields populated accordingly.

    After some testing and a lengthy fine tuning period, it seemed to work. Until someone sent an email with a request that triggered the ticket, and a firestorm of reply-all email; all of which generated tickets.

    After about 100 emails * 50-ish recipients on several teams, the ticket system had been successfully bombarded with 5K+ new tickets, on all the teams that were on all the emails. The same ticket was effectively entered on different systems, repeatedly.

    Unfortunately, nobody noticed it before some corporate report was run, which showed a rather large across-the-board simultaneous spike in problem tickets on ALL of our systems. These spawned automated entries in quality systems targeting the systems with spikes in problems.

    Requests for explanations came down from the C-level folks resulting in myriad meetings of managers at all levels with their bosses, on up the chain. Even though that eventually got straightened out and all the tickets were wiped out, the QA folks already had their eyes on all of our teams for full audits to identify the problems.

    Hilarity ensued for the next two weeks.

    But the email scanner/ticket generator will save time.

     

     



  • I love it.

    It's like an abstract implementation of 42.zip.



  • Whoops! I guess your star developer forgot what happens when somebody (in this case, the automated system) quotes the original e-mail. Poor guy, I bet he is feeling especially smart now. That sucks too, because aside of this fiasco, it sounded like a Good Idea™.



  • @snoofle said:

    Some time ago we got bought out by a large conglomerate. We are now in the process of migrating our systems and procedures to work with theirs.

    Commiserations.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    Please remove me from this ticket.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Please remove me from this ticket.

    Me too


  • :belt_onion:

    @boomzilla said:

    Please remove me from this ticket.
    Me too!


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @heterodox said:

    @boomzilla said:

    Please remove me from this ticket.
    Me too!

     

    Could not reproduce, and I have too many other issues to address. Ticket closed.



  • Ticket 100000: Closed as duplicate of ticket 100001
    Ticket 100001: Closed as duplicate of ticket 100002
    .
    .
    .

    It would a dull couple of days but your "Tickets Closed" metric would be through the roof


  • Garbage Person

     And that's why you always put anything that scrapes an email for information on a fucking button and manually activate it, instead of doing it 100% automatically. It's not like it adds that much work to the average tech professional's email sorting day.



  • @RTapeLoadingError said:

    Ticket 100000: Closed as duplicate of ticket 100001
    Ticket 100001: Closed as duplicate of ticket 100000

    FTFY



  •  So all you need do is to write a script that automatically deletes tickets which are duplicates of other tickets? Simples. 


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