| I don't know exactly how it would work. But if I wanted to figure it out, I would start by taking a fairly large project's ticket tracker and sort through every reply on every ticket and try to categorize them into buckets. For instance, I'd expect you to find "me too" comments, and those should be eliminated, just as "me too" "answers" on S.O. are eliminated. I'd expect you to find status-update queries and replies. So that suggests you need a mechanism for pinging for an update that doesn't require a bunch of text from user and developer, or else some mechanism by which the freshness of a ticket becomes irrelevant.add new answers to old questions.) I'd expect you to find people posting workarounds, which would suggest that you want workarounds to be a different "type" than regular commentary, and you probably want them called out separately somehow. It sucks to have to read through three pages of identical me-too complaints to find a workaround and then read through another two pages of people thanking the workaround author for the workaround, as frequently happens on the Ubuntu tracker. I'm not sure if these are helpful examples or not, but I think when you see a pile of messages that you have to read through to extract content, you are looking at an opportunity to work out the hidden semantics of the thing, and turn those hidden semantics into first-class entities and actions, to make a more structured environment that will save people time. I have seen too many JIRA deployments where the only plan was, make the state machine larger and require more separate fields from everybody. But those fields and states really just represent the hope that you might not have to read that pile of comments. In practice, most of those fields wind up empty, most of those states wind up skipped over, and you still have to read the whole ticket. Why? Because a JIRA ticket is still fundamentally a chronologically-sorted forum thread. |