Should we clean up our ticket system?



  • Hey, I have a question for you guys.  We track our development efforts with a ticketing system.  Tickets are created to start development on a project, updated as work progresses and QA is performed, and then closed when the project is released into production.  Pretty standard stuff.  I was bored one day and pulled a report from the system showing "abandoned" tickets.  That is, tickets that are still open and haven't been worked on in months.  (When we usually finish things in weeks, or maybe two months at most.)

    I'm curious if I should bring these to the attention of my boss and offer to close them out.  Is this an unnecessary OCD idea?  Or is it a good idea to keep an eye on this kind of thing.  I'm kind of curious why things are simply abandoned instead of closed with a disposition of say "no longer needed" or whatever.  And it's not a huge deal, but when I had the system graph the abandoned tickets by dev lead, one lead owns about 90% of the tickets.  Does that say he's maybe not doing his job?  Or is it meaningless?



  •  Who creates the tickets in the first place?  Is it that lead who owns 90% of the abandoned tickets, who maybe comes from an environment where you're encouraged to ticket every little issue and discrepancy so it can be tracked?  Perhaps said lead has been marked for eventual dismissal, and the growing backlog of unclosed tickets is management's way of documenting his performance so they can stave off any wrongful-termination lawsuit he might file after they can his ass.



  • It is something to look into, they may be abandoned do to lack of response from requesters (so the lead with all of them may have them due to who they work with).  I know projects where I am get dropped or handed off without proper warning so that's what I'd assume it is.



  •  Most often the leads create the tickets, although the developers and I (business analyst) sometimes create them.  I suspect that Locallunatic is closer to the truth.  Our environment is internal IT, and projects get started and abandoned all the time.  That's still no excuse (IMO) to not close the tickets.

    I'm new at this place and learning how "things are done here", so I don't want to rock the boat too soon.  For all I know the tickets aren't even used to evaluate the dev teams.  We do a quick analysis of how many tickets get kicked back by QA for rework, but that's about it.  Every month we pull a report of time logged on tickets "this month" and a separate report of tickets closed "this month". So that leaves a truck-sized hole for many things to pass completely unseen.  I'm not sure if it's something important to bring to anybody's attention.



  • @jetcitywoman said:

    Hey, I have a question for you guys.  We track our development efforts with a ticketing system.  Tickets are created to start development on a project, updated as work progresses and QA is performed, and then closed when the project is released into production.  Pretty standard stuff.  I was bored one day and pulled a report from the system showing "abandoned" tickets.  That is, tickets that are still open and haven't been worked on in months.  (When we usually finish things in weeks, or maybe two months at most.)

    I'm curious if I should bring these to the attention of my boss and offer to close them out.  Is this an unnecessary OCD idea?  Or is it a good idea to keep an eye on this kind of thing.  I'm kind of curious why things are simply abandoned instead of closed with a disposition of say "no longer needed" or whatever.  And it's not a huge deal, but when I had the system graph the abandoned tickets by dev lead, one lead owns about 90% of the tickets.  Does that say he's maybe not doing his job?  Or is it meaningless?

    Is always fruitles endeavor. but send email to someone higher up anyway. let that email stay buried. if thing come back to bite you, show them email sent ages ago.



  • I guess I'll chime in here:

    Let sleeping dogs lie.



  •  Okay, thanks guys!  I'll let it go.  I didn't think it was a big deal, but...  just in case, I thought I'd ask some developers.


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