In 2017, one of the Atlassian Solution Partners (Valiantys) published a “Performance at scale: Can Jira handle 10 million issues?”. They checked how the Jira Data Center works with 10 million issues. It is probably not a standard situation to have such a large number of issues. Nevertheless, the average number of tickets on Jira instances is growing. This doesn’t only apply to Jira Server or Data Center. The same trend is taking shape on cloud instances, although the basis is much smaller.
Among the many reasons for such a large number of issues, it’s worth distinguishing three key ones:
A large number of issues affect not only the performance of the Jira instance. Multiplying tickets makes users work harder:
These and many other questions surely arise in the minds of Jira users. Let's work on finding the answer to them.
When it comes to duplicate issues, there are four techniques to reduce them. It doesn’t require much interference in the configuration of Jira and the time overhead of administrators.
Depending on the business case, you can actively inform your clients about current incidents. This allows customers to know that you’re aware of the problem and don’t need a new incident request. On the customer portal, you can easily add an announcement banner. You can also create such a message for Jira users.
Analyze the existing duplicates and try to answer the following questions:
You may find that the process is responsible for duplicate submissions. Sometimes it’s enough to fill a process gap or write a comprehensive knowledge base article.
What you can do without any major investment is user education. Provide them with data on the cost of handling duplicate issues. Show how it affects the waiting time for support when the agent has to write back the same to the next person. You can also add announcements or messages from the ticket creation screen telling you how to check for a similar problem in the backlog.
When you have performed all the actions above and still have duplicates in the queue, you can link them. Remember to copy all important comments to one main issue. Do the same with attachments and field values. You can close linked tasks to work only on that one issue.
Manually linking the problems up seems to be a good option. Unfortunately, along with the scale, it ceases to be effective. It becomes time-consuming and tedious. It can also cause mistakes. To take the merger issue seriously, try our Issue Merger PRO for Jira app. In addition to allowing you to conveniently merge issues by eliminating a lot of manual clicking, it provides many advanced features.
If you want to merge issues like a pro, you definitely have to try Sync next comments and Auto-merge features provided by this app.
Automatically finding duplicate tickets when creating a new one - doesn't that sound interesting? This is how the functionality called Auto-merge works. You won't find it in any other app for merging tickets.
You surely know Automation for Jira. In the same way, you configure the rules that will allow you to combine the issues.
Another pro feature is Sync next comments. When you merge two or more issues with this option, all future comments from source issues will be copied to the issue you merged to. This allows you to focus only on one issue.
Do you want to become a merger master in your company? Do you see the potential in our app? Are you already excited about a backlog or a duplicate-free queue? If you answered "Yes" to at least one of these questions, install our Issue Merger PRO for Jira. Remember that it is completely free for instances of up to 10 users!
If you are interested in a demo of our app and a discussion about your expectations, book a meeting with us via calendly 👩🏻💻👨💻
This article can be also interested for you:
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash