Dear community, Right now, we have people who are regularly going through JIRA and triaging tickets. This is totally fantastic, and a very valuable activity for the project. (So thank you!) But I also notice that specific individuals are being assigned to the tickets in the process.
This is a form of "cookie licking". The analogy is that if you fancy a cookie, but you're too hungry right now, you take a lick of it so nobody else can touch it. This is an anti-pattern and we should try to avoid it. In general, I would say we should only be assigning a ticket to ourselves, and we should only be doing that when we actually intend to sit down and work on it. If we have people going through and saying "well, this is clearly Joe's area" or "this is clearly Fred's area" then that is a great way to make sure that those areas remain "Joe's area" or "Fred's area" or whatever. Which is unhealthy for the project. So what I would suggest is that we consider changing the way we work here. Ticket triage might change so that tickets are put on to component backlogs. And engineers can switch from grabbing tickets of their "assigned to me" report, and start looking at the "Foo feature backlog" report instead. Selecting a ticket and assigning it *to themselves* when they are *starting work on it*. (This would then take the ticket off the component backlog. So the backlog report would only display tickets that were unassigned and available to grab.) This would mean that all this valuable ticket triage work we're doing is something that can benefit everyone in the project (not just people who are already known for their contributions) and will hopefully open the development workflow to people who are just starting out with the project, or want to get their toes wet. In fact, when someone comes to us and asks "how can I contribute" we can point them at these backlogs and say "well, just grab a ticket off one of these queues, assign it to yourself, and start working on it!" We could make use of a "difficulty" field too, so you could sort by difficulty, and grab one of the "easy", "medium", or "hard" tickets. Thoughts? -- NS
