I’ve been having a one-man ticket derby this weekend, the goal of a Ticket Derby (as I’m defining it) is to close as many tickets as possible. I’ve closed 15 so far, aiming for quantity of tickets, not quality of tickets. I’ve resolved sorting issues, one line fixes to change the From address on some email notifications; changed the name servers on old domains, etc. Lots of easy stuff. But it’s closed and out of the way!

I decided to do this because I was finding our ticket system a bit overwhelming: pages of tickets all awaiting my attention. I had over 60 assigned tickets a week ago. Now I’m down to 39. As a small shop, and without a project manager (dedicated or otherwise), I was doing my best to prioritize tickets based on criteria like: customer impact, revenue generation, time saved, etc. Tickets that fared well in those categories tended to be large affairs, requiring a decent amount of effort. This left me with an intimidating, seemingly endless wall-of-work. Adding Date Opened to the view just made it depressing. The derby seemed like a great way to clear out the work and make the wall less intimidating.

I’m finding my open & assigned ticket screen manageable now. If your team has been working on big issues for a while, why not give them a few days to plow through some easy stuff? I awarded prizes for my derby, giving out chocolate in a few categories: oldest ticket closed, most tickets closed, most humorous commit message.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a bellyache.