How to track customer demand for feature requests or bugs?

[Erica Larson]

What is the best way to track customer demand for features or bug fixes?  

A user has requested that we add a field that can track how often a customer contacts about an issue, bug, or feature request.  They could then log it onto the story that relates.  

The voting feature would be great but it only allows one vote per user so we wouldn't be able to vote on behalf of the customer.  A custom field is the only thing I can think of right now.  

[omjones]

+1 for this feature 

[GabrielleJ]

This can be accomplished in a couple of ways:

• Natively use JIRA "Components" or "Labels" on similar issues so you will have an exact count of related issues, like for a particular bug or feature.
• Create JIRA Issue Links on related issues so you can visually see the count
  
  

[Erica Larson]

Thank you for your response.  This will definitely work for grouping related stories and bugs.  

We won't necessarily have a new story every time a customer contacts about an issue though.  If it is a known feature request or bug that already has a story built out to capture the details, we wouldn't create a new one.  We just want to keep a tally of how many customer have contacted about it.

[GabrielleJ]

Earlier, I was thinking of suggesting a "Number" custom field that you can increment anytime (through the Edit screen or a transition) but I am personally against this option. Let's say I have a ticket named "Feature 1", then 2 users have said the same thing. I will go ahead and increment a custom field named "Hits" to 2. Then another 3 came up, update it againt to "5" and so on. If I will go back and review this issue, where's the traceability? Who are these 5 users that just voted for mentioned "Feature 1"? When did they mention it? Is it still relevant or up to date? 

[Erica Larson]

That is all I could think of as well and I agree that there seem to be more negatives with a custom number field than positives.