Technical Comments ~ to avoid sifting through the static

Rosa M Fossi

Hello Community, 

I was curious whether anyone has run into the need -and a subsequent solution- for "Technical Comments" (or notes) in tickets. 

You would think that ALL comments in a software project are technical, but we know that is not the case.  Some tickets see a slew of things like "@namehere Have you seen this?" or perhaps a relevant back-and-forth that is not technical in nature but more resource/schedule management.  

My devs are asking for a way to set aside a "technical comment" space where they can easily glance and only see technical information (DB names or specs or lib references, etc etc).   

I hesitated in even asking because it feels like it would be adding "one more place" to go look for information within a ticket.  And undoubtedly someone will place info in the wrong "comment" section....  but that's how Service Desk operates (internal vs share-with-cust) and it does just fine.

I'd appreciate any insight any of you can provide.

 

PS: I've volleyed the idea of "why don't you update the description?" but that comes with its own concerns.

Andy Heinzer

One of the ways that Atlassian's own support teams have tackled this kind of problem is through the use of wiki markup; specifically using the panel element like so:

{panel:title=Internal note| borderStyle=dashed| borderColor=#3C78B5| titleBGColor=#3C78B5| bgColor=#E7F4FA}

Here is where we post a detailed technical analysis internally on a Jira ticket

{panel}

The process tends to be to first set the comment to a private group/role (if using Core or Software), and then insert this kind of template into a new comment.  If you're using Service Desk (JSD) then you have a separate button to click for 'Comment Internally'.  From there you can customize the text in the body to contain what you need.   The advantage here is that having this panel set different values for background color and header really help it to stand out amongst the dozens or possibly hundreds of comments in an issue.

Of course you can change the color codes here as you like, but I'd recommend that you share some kind of consistent template here with your agents/developers so that they can consistently and quickly find these comments on an issue.