Tech debt tracking in company-managed project

[Barbara Shaw]

Hi - we would like to track tech debt over several projects. I have created a "tech debt management" company-managed kanban project and added all the project keys of all the company-managed projects involved to the filter query. I created a new "tech debt" issue type.
***We would like to track how often tech debt slows down a project. I was asked it we could simply ask the engineers something like this "did you get unexpectedly slowed down during this project?" If yes, open a "tech debt" issue and link it to the originating issue. My questions:
Workflow/screens:
1.Would asking the "were you slowed down" question be best presented via a custom field in a resolution screen?
2. Would I then need to add this resolution screen to the done/closed transition in all of the workflows for all the issues types in all the participating projects? 
3. Is there an easier way to do this ^^^^??
Tech debt issue type:
I also imagine that I must manually add the new "tech debt" issue type to the issue type scheme for each participating project. Since many of the projects have different issue types, I can't apply a new issue type scheme to the existing projects globally given their varied configs. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Hi Barbera,

I've run into something similar a few times in the past.

Would asking the "were you slowed down" question be best presented via a custom field in a resolution screen?

Probably.  I'm not sure where else you might ask and get a response

Would I then need to add this resolution screen to the done/closed transition in all of the workflows for all the issues types in all the participating projects? 

Yes (or add the question to existing ones)

Is there an easier way to do this ^^^^??

Not without relying on your people to know that they need to do stuff to report these issues (I imagine you also want the ability for them to report them independently of other issues)

I also imagine that I must manually add the new "tech debt" issue type to the issue type scheme for each participating project.

Yes, if the debt always needs to be addressed by that project.  But maybe not.

I'll run through a case that I think is close to this.

• Create a project for this
• Yes, we added a field (just a simple tick box) to the resolution screens, and some other places - in fact, we used SR fragments to add a button for it!
• When button was clicked or field set on resolution, we automated the heck out of it:
  • Create issue in new project, with
    • Assignee = person who triggered it (because we probably want more info from them)
    • Summary = <triggering issue key> uncovered a problem
    • Link to the triggering issue
    • Project picker set to the triggering project (yes, you can get it from the link, but this makes it really easy to search and report)

Then, after the new issue had been analysed, we gave the analysers a "create linked issue in appropriate project(s)" button as well, which copied all their suggestions about how to fix it into it.

I don't think all of that is possible in Cloud, but a lot of it is.

[Barbara Shaw]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- thanks - I appreciate your suggestions! Love the automation idea. I was also considering asking the "were you slowed down" question as a field required validation on the workflow transition to done/closed. That may be cleaner than the resolution screen approach?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That would get a bit messy.  You could not set the field as mandatory, because mandatory fields need to be filled as soon as the issue is created.

You don't make fields mandatory on screens either (that would be a huge, but very very welcome change to the way Jira works, in my opinion), so what you would need to do is create validators in the workflow to say "no, you can't close this unless you answer the yes/no we asked you".  There's nothing wrong with that, but I would only do it if you find lots of people not ticking the "there was a problem" box when there was.