Good Ticket Hygiene Helps Engineers Too
Why keeping Jira up-to-date benefits everyone, not just managers
Every team strives to deliver on their commitments and create value for the organization. The reason I started minware is I believe tracking and improving metrics is an essential part of doing this at scale.
The first layer of metrics we show to people cover five basic ticket hygiene practices: (1) representing work in tickets, (2) estimating tickets, (3) working on tickets in sprints, (4) adding tickets to epics, and (5) setting due dates on epics.
But the question we sometimes get from engineers is: what’s in it for me?
Not in a selfish sense, but engineers want to spend as much of their time as possible creating value for customers. Keeping Jira up-to-date may seem like busy work.
It may also make engineers nervous to share what they’re doing and attach an estimate to it, especially if they don’t feel supported by their manager.
It’s natural for individuals to feel like ticket hygiene does not benefit them. However, it really does if you look at the big picture, which is what we explore in this article.
Estimates expose problems early
Perhaps the biggest reason every software engineer should estimate their work (even if they are working alone on a side project!) is that estimation forces you to think through a detailed plan. Putting story point or time estimates on every ticket and organizing tickets in sprints and epics means you have to consider everything that’s involved with achieving your goal.
One of the most common mistakes software teams make is starting work with only vague back-of-the-napkin plans and continually discovering scope as they go along.
This obviously increases the risk of missing deadlines if you have them, but even if you don’t, not estimating can cause major inefficiency.
Teams that don’t plan well often put too much effort into polishing earlier tasks. Then, as time goes on and they discover how much work is left, there is tremendous pressure to cut scope and ship something valuable as soon as possible.
However, they can’t cut scope on the earlier tasks because those are already done.
Estimating work enables you to address resource limitations up front when you have the most flexibility.
Ticket hygiene communicates clear expectations
For individual engineers, estimates are a critical tool for communicating and managing expectations. By estimating tickets, committing to them in sprints, and setting due dates on epics, your manager and outside stakeholders know what to expect. They can ask you to change your plans if they don’t like what they see, but should otherwise leave you in peace while you’re working.
In contrast, teams without good ticket hygiene tend to be dominated by chaos. Managers and stakeholders always need things done by a certain time. When there aren’t reliable ticket estimates, sprints, and epics, they’ll ping people constantly on Slack, which further interrupts engineers and delays work.
If you’re an engineer and people send you messages every day asking when things will be done (outside of a stand-up), the first step of the solution is better ticket hygiene.
Predictable teams are rewarded
The ultimate goal of good ticket hygiene is to make it easier for teams to deliver on their commitments and create value for the organization.
At first glance, this may not seem like it benefits the individual that much.
However, the team’s success or failure often has more influence on career trajectory than individual performance.
Software teams that deliver on their promises make customers happy and win deals.
Salespeople with dependable software teams promise more and grow market share.
Companies with more revenue pay higher bonuses, expand the team, promote people, and have a good reputation.
Even without counting equity, profit sharing, or bonuses, being on a strong team gives you a major advantage with future employment and compensation.
Imagine these two hypothetical applicants:
Someone with outstanding recommendations from managers at a company that had poor software quality and went bankrupt, or…
An applicant who didn’t get promoted quickly but was on the core product team at a hot tech company that recently had a big IPO
I would rather hire the applicant from the hot tech company whose team shipped features that users wanted. Wouldn’t you?
Everyone should optimize their ticket hygiene metrics
It’s in everyone’s interest – even on the smallest and newest teams – to consistently follow basic ticket hygiene best practices and keep track of them with metrics.
Here’s what you should be doing to estimate work and make sure those estimates are visible to others:
Representing work with tickets – If significant work isn’t represented in your ticketing system, no one will be able to tell when it will be done or if it is complete without communicating out-of-band. Also, under-the-radar work impacts the predictability of ticketed work.
Setting estimates on tickets – Every ticket that you commit to starting (e.g., by adding it to a sprint) should have an estimate of some form. Otherwise, you don’t know how much capacity you’re committing to complete, and you won’t be able to accurately project your velocity in the future.
Adding tickets to sprints/iterations – Any team that does planned work or has to balance stakeholder requests over a longer time frame (i.e., more than just an IT service team with response time SLAs) should add all the tickets that their team members work on to a sprint so that they can estimate when a certain scope of work will be done. Consistently completing tickets that are scheduled in the current sprint tremendously eases the burden of stakeholder communication.
Adding tickets to epics – When there are larger tasks or broader outcomes, it is important to add all the related tickets to a parent epic so that stakeholders can clearly see the status of the high-level work they care about in one place. Without epics, it’s hard to see the status or projected completion date of important business deliverables.
Setting due dates on epics – Whether you do this automatically by sizing epics and lining them up on a timeline or setting each due date individually, specifying estimated due dates is critical for communicating with stakeholders and retrospectively assessing planning accuracy to identify misses and continuously improve.
Without ticket hygiene to provide essential visibility, it’s nearly impossible for teams to achieve the higher-level goal of consistently delivering high-quality software.