How to track number of times an issue is reported or hit

Question

I want to do a data driven approach of prioritizing bugs for fixing. Hence, I would want to track if an issue is being hit multiple times. For example what can be called a critical bug can actually be a corner case. Instead I want to capture if a bug is being hit by multiple people or on multiple occassions and hence prioritze that over a corner case bug. But there is no way in jira to track this.

I want a way where whenever a bug is reproduced or hit again, I go and do a +1 and then have the final count at a point in time. Say if a bug has +10, it means this bug has been reported by 10 different instances(different users or same user hitting again).

Also further enhancements can be to check how many times hit in a specific period(example last 1 month, etc)

This would be of a good value add i suppose.

We do have voting option , but that cant be used for this purpose as one person has only one vote.

Tim Kopperud · Answer

Hi @Nag Pavan Chilakam, welcome to Atlassian Community. You might try something like this.

* Create a numbered custom field, named e.g., Hit count
* Add a manually triggered rule for issue type Bug
* In rule action edit the Hit count field by adding 1

Details:

In step 1 you must set a defualt value on the field, e.g., 1

Rule example

Smart value example

Usage

Under the Issue action (ref red) you now will have the option to execute the rule. Notice the rule name is the option the users see (ref yellow), hence you should use a user friendly rule name, e.g., Add bug hit (as in this example)

TimK

Wojciech Wardaszko_p20bth · Answer

Hi @Nag Pavan Chilakam

Welcome to the Community!

In our operations, we have two data sources for this. One is customer requests - whenever someone reports a bug, we store it in our JSM project and link it to the product backlog item. Number of issues linked is our measure.

Another metric is coming directly from infrastructure. We do our best to give our errors handling with verbose descriptions, and track occurences of those descriptions in logs, as well as count of 4xx and 5xx responses from our servers. If the number grows above the usual baseline, we know there might be something amiss, and sometimes that something is a bug introduced in a release.

When we discover anything like that, we either create a backlog item or update an existing one to increase it's priority.

Cheers!

Fionnuala Callan · Answer

Hi @Nag Pavan Chilakam

Depending on how important this is to you, perhaps below is a possible workaround while waiting for Atlassian to implement such a feature

Workaround - Use the 'duplicates' issue link.

i.e. Whenever a bug is found, a new bug is raised (an issue of type bug/defect is created).

During triage of that bug, if it is discovered that the same bug has been raised previously,

a) this latest bug is marked duplicate. Marking as duplicate can be done by a number of different ways ( will depend on how your existing workflow conventions/limitations)

- having a 'duplicate' state in the workflow (this is an 'in-progress' active state)

- using a custom field for 'duplicate'

- marking resolution as 'won't fix' and reason 'duplicate'.

b) this latest bug is linked to the original bug using the 'duplicates' link.

With this tagging of duplicates, it should be possible to extract

a) how big an overall problem duplicates are

b) whether there are specific bugs that are being hit frequently, ie. have a large number of duplicates. (although counts of the presence of a particular issuekey within link fields aren't trivial)