[Fiware-lab] JIRA for user tickets - best practice

[Uwe Herzog]

Dear Bernd, all, (cc to L1-helpdesk for info)

see my comments inline below.

Best regards,
Uwe


From: Bochow, Bernd [mailto:bernd.bochow at fokus.fraunhofer.de]
Sent: 12 February 2015 14:09
To: wp5 at fi-xifi.eu
Subject: [Xifi-WP5] JIRA for user tickets - best practice

Dear All,

I just learned that tickets received from users are not automagically copied back to the user when you respond to them as the help desk.

Since FIWARE lab users don't have a JIRA account they cannot be "mentioned" (i.e. Included through referencing them by @username in the text).

The only way besides writing them by mail, manually copying all the relevant text, is to share the ticket with them.
The following questions came up when thinking about this option:

- When sharing a ticket, the user receives a link to the ticket that allows to browse the
ticket as an anonymous user. Does this discloses any internal information that must not be shared?
An external user that has received the link to a ticket can indeed browse the whole ticket and could theoretically also read information not intended for the public that was entered. However, at least L1-helpdesk is aware that tickets are readable by external users without login and thus should normally consider this when entering comments in the ticket. Nevertheless, some information has to be entered in the ticket so that the issue can be resolved and this is internal processing information which by the public nature of the ticket externals can read. One can debate if this is good or bad. I think a piece of transparency towards the developers does not harm in our case.

- Does this allow a user to add a comment?
There is no direct button to do so and a user not familiar with the help desk will probably
reply by mail in anyway.
External users cannot enter comments as they are in read-only mode. Therefore communication towards the developer can be done via the ticket (if you send the link to the ticket to the developer and then enter your response in the ticket). But if the developer wants to answer (e.g. informing of his tenant id) this can only be done via email. I think this is not a good approach.

- If so, how do we maintain efficiently "side-channel" communication with the user?
Are we required to copy any mail exchange with a user back into the ticket?
I think it is not required to have every small side communication between node and developer in the ticket. There should be sufficient information to later trace whether the issue was resolved, what the actual issue was and how it was resolved.

I would very much appreciate any suggestion.

I'm worried about scalability when the number of nodes and developers is growing. For L-1 helpdesk that receives and can respond to every original email requests from developers the matter is easy. All these emails are auto-appended in the ticket. All nodes that are not in L1-helpdesk do not receive the original developer email and thus cannot reply to this. If they reply in a new email, the response is not auto-appended in the ticket (even if it is copied to fiware-lab-help at lists.fi-ware.org<mailto:fiware-lab-help at lists.fi-ware.org>, as Jira is missing the link to the ticket), which means that the local node helpdesk has to enter all email content manually in the ticket. This is not efficient. One solution would be to have all node helpdesks receiving all developer request emails (and not just L1 helpdesk). Then, in case a ticket is assigned to a node, the node helpdesk can look up the developer email and reply to that, benefitting from the auto-append feature in Jira.

Best Regards, Bernd

============
Bernd Bochow
Next Generation Network Infrastructures
Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS)
Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 31, D-10589 Berlin
e-mail: bernd.bochow at fokus.fraunhofer.de<mailto:bernd.bochow at fokus.fraunhofer.de>, bernd.bochow at ieee.org<mailto:bernd.bochow at ieee.org>
phone:  +49 30 3463-7238
fax:    +49 30 3463-997238
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