Recommendations for "Triage Queue"?

[Jackson Chen]

Hi All,

We're looking to set up a "root/triage" queue for a project within Jira, in which all incoming service request tickets to our group will be assigned initially before it gets reassigned/picked up by one of our engineers. What's the best practice in Jira for this? Neither setting up a "triage user" account nor creating a "version" seems appropriate. Any suggestions? Thank you in advance for your help!

[Justin Corcoran · Accepted solution]

This sounds more like a status than an assignee. The way I read this, your issue comes in, gets triaged (I assume you meet as a team to decide next steps, who to assign it to, etc), and is then assigned and moved along in the process. I would recommend simply making "triage" the first step in your workflow.

[Jackson Chen]

Thank you for responding, Justin!

Let me clarify: we're looking for a placeholder location for all incoming tickets -- instead of having the project lead as the default assignee for all tickets opened under a specific project, we'd like to have a "community folder" so that multiple people on the team (manager, tech lead, project manager) can go into that placeholder location to pickup/reassign the ticket to the most appropriate team member.

This will help us avoid having unprocessed and in-progress tickets being mixed in the same pool (i.e.: both being in the project lead's folder, as he also actively works on tickets), as well as providing a simple and current view of all tickets that have been assigned to our group, but haven't been assigned to a resource. Hope this clears things up a bit.

[Justin Corcoran]

That does help to clarify. First, I'd suggest changing the default assignee from Project Lead to Unassigned (https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA044/Creating+an+Unassigned+Issue). With that done, I'd still recommend an initial step of "triage" or "needs review" or something along those lines. If you're using GreenHopper (and if you're not, I highly recommend it) you can have "triage" as your first column in the rapid board. It should then be easy to identify the work that hasn't been started vs. work that is in progress.

Alternatively, you could set up a "Triage" project with the same create screen as your normal project, and have issues created into that project. Then, when you're ready to take one on, you could move it to the "normal" project. I don't think this is as clean, as moving an issue to another project requires multiple clicks while moving an issue from the "triage" step in the workflow to another step is only one click (or drag and drop on the rapid board).

Does that help?

[Jackson Chen]

Thank you Justin, that helps! We'll try it out and see how it goes with the team!

[Kelly Arrey]

+1 for Justin's answer - create a status called "In Triage" or something, and make it the first column on your Rapid Board. I also agree with him that setting up a Triage project is more complicated, and doesn't offer any advantage over an "In Triage" status.

[Igor Sereda [ALM Works]]

Typically triage is set up as Justin recommends.

In advanced cases, or where using Status or Assignee is not convenient, you can also use our Structure plugin, which introduces "stuctures" - arbitrary collections of issues with order and hierarchy, which is represented on a separate page or on a Dashboard.

You can set up a "Triage" structure with a synchronizer (background automation) that would add an issue to the structure once it satisfies some criteria. Then the users can watch this structure in real time, move issues around and edit in-line to assign them to someone or move along the workflow. The same synchronizer can likewise be set up to automatically remove issues from the structure once they have been triaged.

Disclosure: I work for the company behind Structure plugin.