Importance of Ticketing Systems in App Dev

Ticketing Systems are extremely important in IT environments! In many places it’s pretty easy to find a single developer who is in charge of several requirements and development roles, where they are deploying or releasing an application that happens to have several thousand eyes on it. And through the development process, it is very easy to see the ratio of business users, end test users, managers, quality assurance testers, business analysts, and who ever else they can get their hands on to ensure that an application is up to spec.

To keep this simple, lets just imagine how a new application is seen initially when presented to the business. First of all, everyone wants to provide valuable feedback and to make the system as Great as they can. This is to be expected. It’s how a project evolves. But many places, the clear requirements are never completely laid out before a project launches, and we come up with terms such as Agile and Iterative to justify a strategy for non-well formed requirements (that’s another topic).

When that application is presented, lets take it down to a very basic level, what that looks like in terms of people looking and testing. 3 Business Users who are subject matter experts, 2 Quality Assurance experts, 1 Project Manager, 1 Business Analyst, and say around 5 End Test Users who would be using the system. That gets you to about 12 people before this thing launches on a global scale and only 4 of those work in IT.

Without a proper ticketing system, a developer will be completely swamped if they have direct access to to that developer, in a time period where the date has been set, and most of these people are seeing this for the first time. Ticketing Systems, along with a good BA to intercept requests, and a PM to prioritize, make projects go grave distances, because you are perfectly utilizing your developer. Not often a task that’s easy to do. Not to mention, all those requests have a history, code attached to them, ability to quantify, track, and just make life a bit more simple.