Chekhov’s Jira Ticket
You emerge from a Teams meeting, tired and afraid of what's to come.
Patty was sharing her screen for 45 minutes of the meeting. You watched her navigate on her computer; she spoke every word that she typed on screen at the same speed she typed, sounding out the words as she went. She also would navigate to the "edit" button on the taskbar after highlighting words to copy the words she highlighted and again navigated to another page where she again navigated to "edit" to paste in the text she copied. It would have been faster if she typed, but she refused to learn how to ctrl+c and ctrl+v to copy/paste.
The meeting was excruciating but you held on. Eventually, she navigated to Jira, attempting to search for a ticket. When she begins typing in the ticket she's looking for, you see her autofill suggest the ticket "JIRA-1", which came as a surprise. The first ticket that someone deemed necessary to build?
This thought was brushed to the side as she finally sounded out the letters numbers of the ticket she was intended to type JIRA-1992, a story from a recent sprint. The goal of this ticket was to "make site search better" as Patty had expertly defined and crafted the ticket's goals with a deft touch.
You weep in awe of the STAR method applied so effortlessly, both empowering the team to define their own direction of making the site search better, but also the amount of depth she crafted into a ticket with just the concentrated 4 words she chose.
It had been months since that fateful day. Patty had since fallen out of a plane when she had mistaken the emergency exit handle for the bathroom door handle, sending herself immediately into the air.
The website's search has continued to be plagued by inaccurate search results and many times, no results at all for the specific topic. It's as if the search engine was only searching itself.
You plunge the Jira backlog, there are now 5,564 stories in the backlog after the Great Project Plan of 2024 where tickets were created in droves, many having titles consisting of 1-4 characters. After scrolling the backlog for hours, looking through the 300 tickets in the current 5 month sprint, you find JIRA-1992, "Make the site search gooder" and look through the attached comments-yearning for some logic or reasoning about why the site search isn't better.
After staring at the ticket for minutes, hours, wading through all the form fields; points, story points, story hours, points hours, story minutes, points hours minutes, and the 100's of other fields, you finally stumble upon the golden secret, a ticket dependency:
JIRA-1
You quickly click the blue link, converting it to purple and you are shocked to see the ticket was listed as "To Do". That horror is only taken one step further when you see the title, "Make search link to internet instead of own db".
The world unravels as you discover the grand fault of the website. The problem that's plagued the team for months. The 100's of tickets that have been completed have been built on the back of a broken giant.
JIRA-1 was later injected into the sprint after a 2 month approval process.
