What do you call it? A ticket? An issue? An item? A work item? A requirement? A Jira issue? (Obviously not, if your squad is not using Jira.) I am referring to the most general notion of an item in the collection of items in your Agile workflow management system. By most general, I mean that some of them might be called defects, and others might be called user stories or epics or requirements or what have you, but what do you call an item that could be any of the items in the entire collection, regardless of type?
At Rational we usually called them Work Items. Jira calls them issues. I’ve heard the word tickets used many, many times over the years. My current squads seem to be calling them Jiras, which strikes me as kind of amusing but it’s entirely logical, given that they use Jira.
I looked up some examples of Agile workflow management systems. There are a lot of them, some I haven’t even heard of, and some I know but which the current literature doesn’t mention. I found Atlassian Jira, Rally, Clearquest, Rational Team Concert, Active Collab, Agilo for Scrum, Pivotal Tracker, SprintGround, TargetProcess, and VersionOne, among others.
I’m also interested in whether you think of these items more in the context of work to be done or more in the context of specifying the need or requirement. (Except, per Walker Royce, it’s not a requirement, it is a desirement. It’s negotiable. Agile readily acknowledges this but it wasn’t at all obvious at the time Walker first began speaking of this idea.) These days I see less of a need for requirements management because Agile asks your feedback loop to be very short, and asks for dedicated product management, which generally means that simply accounting for the requirements/desirements as work items is sufficient. That is, this work to do, and when done, the work will result in meeting this desirement. In very large systems, not so much, but in a substantial part of the IT world this is what is working.
As always, your thoughts are welcome.