Preemptively avoiding duplicate issues

Nathan Stack

I manage a quality assurance team and am always looking for better ways to use the tools we have on hand.

We use Jira for bug tracking, and because we sometimes have multiple QA analysts working on the same project at the same time, there is the potential for duplicate tickets.

To avoid this as much as possible, I've recommended that the team use a Confluence page to initially note their findings prior to creating Jira tickets for them -- a type of triage. This seems less than ideal.

Any suggestions for how we might accomplish this more efficiently?

Petter Gonçalves

Hello @Nathan Stack

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

Indeed, there is no methodology that would completely prevent your team from creating duplicate issues, however, there are some best practices you can implement to avoid that kind of problem to happen very often.

In Atlassian, we also face this same problem, since we have a public portal to log suggestions/feedback and bugs (jira.atlassian.com). The best practices we have implemented so far are:

1 - Have a good segmentation of your tickets, so it will be easier for your team to identify if any ticket was already raised about the topic they are working on.

It is a fact that the growth of your team will cause more and more work to get off the track of your team members. To prevent that, Jira has several features and fields that allow you to group tickets of a common type or subject, allowing your team to search and filter in an easier and faster way to confirm the current progress for a specific topic.

Here are some of those features you can use to better segment your work:

Components | Epics | Filters | Labels

2 - Use the notification functionality to inform your team about any new tickets.

Depending on the size of your team, the notifications will be useful to keep your queue masters/managers aware of new tickets creation.

3 - Before effectively work in a ticket, use one of the issue fields (Labels, components, etc) to identify what your team is currently working and what is an "Initial idea". I believe it would be better to have a "triage" inside the Jira application since you will be able to filter and segment it.

Let us know if you have any questions.