The Domain Model of Human Workers: Ticket Tracking Software Must Model Your Engineering Domain
The way humans produce work follows a pattern. This pattern is a company's culture. It's a combination of the way engineers have worked over their own history and the company's history. When using a ticket tracker to organize work, it must accurately match the mental model used by the engineering team in order for it to be effective. When you use the Github issue tracker, Pivotal Tracker, YouTrack, Jira, or your homegrown ticket tracker, you're modeling the work of engineers. It's critical that the real world and your engineering models stay in sync. The only way that the project manager or team lead can really understand the state of the world is through these models. To achieve consistency in the human domain model, you need state, ownership, documentation, and a commitment from engineers to maintain the domain. #### Ticket State Tickets need states that indicate: * In Discussion -- Not ready to start. Work is not scoped. * In Queue -- This ticket is ready to start but work has not begun. * Started -- In progress. * On hold -- Waiting for someone or something. Should be documented in the ticket. * Ready to deploy -- Waiting in a merged state for the next deploy. Work is done. * Deployed -- Code is live in production. * Won't fix -- Not a priority. Won't be worked on. Ticket states allow everyone a quick way to look at and group tickets. #### Ticket Assignment Assign tickets to yourself when they are actively in progress. This indicates that you are responsible for the ticket. When a ticket is assigned, it is a sign to other engineers and to project managers that someone else should not just pick up the ticket and start working on it. Your ticket tracker should also allow you to follow or subscribe to a ticket. If you aren't working on the ticket, but you care about it, subscribe to it. #### Document all of the things! The known information about a piece of work should be documented in a ticket once work has been started. This is the "hit by a bus" safety net. For example, my first child may be born any time now. I might just disappear from the face of the planet with new baby jelly brain for 6 weeks. If the tickets I'm working on are not up to date and suddenly I disappear, then it's absolutely critical that the tickets I'm working on are accurate. My manager can then help the team absorb my work by looking at things that are active and assigned to me. #### Commitment It's critically important that engineers keep their domain model, their ticket system, up to date for the same reason it's important to keep accuracy in any domain model. The engineering team *must* feel well "modeled" by the ticket system they use. The company absolutely needs accurate information to base decisions on and judge the importance and progress of work, and this all hinges on the team's support of the ticket tracker. #### What I use At Engine Yard we use YouTrack. We run it on our own servers and it's far and away the best ticket tracker I've ever used. Our deploys auto-update tickets and build release notes from the tickets. We have chat room bot integration with YouTrack that displays a ticket name and link any time a ticket is mentioned. It allows custom states and focuses on discussion which leads to better solutions and more knowledge sharing. If you don't like your ticket tracker, I highly recommend [YouTrack](http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/).