News from Jan 16, 2008

A growing nightmare here at Adaptavist comes in the form of support tickets not being handed to the customer or support team at the right time. This is down to the UI in JIRA making it less than obvious how to hand a ticket over - so Dan Hardiker decided to start hacking with jQuery... (NB: 2MB video file in this post)

There are two times when a ticket needs to be handed over...

When a customer posts a comment that needs our attention, the ticket should be handed to Adaptavist
When we post a comment for the customers' attention, it should be handed to Customer

The problem is that we can't just automate this - there will be many times when we post comments but aren't yet ready to hand back to the customer and vice versa. That would cause even worse problems (we know, we tried).

This might sound like no big deal, but it's getting to the point where we've got one member of staff spending hours each day handing tickets back and fourth so that the support team can get on with, erm... supporting! If we grow our customer base by another 100% this year, we're going to need to take on full time staff just to hand tickets over. Not good.

What we really needed was some way to prompt the user when the add a comment, asking them whether the ticket needs handing over. This reminds the user and also puts them in control. And more importantly, it saves us several hours a day to get on with more productive tasks.

We used jQuery and it's Impromptu plugin (we might switch over to the Facebox plugin for the final version) and dumped the magic in to a custom field as this was a quick hack.

We work out if the logged in user is from Adaptavist or one of our customers (using JIRA API via a velocity template) and then work out if they need to be prompted to hand the ticket over.

We use jQuery to bind an onclick event handler to the "Add" button - when it's clicked, the prompt is shown if applicable and depending on what choice the user makes we fire their comment to the relevant back-end script.

Our hack is still in the early stages, but already working like a charm. It's only active on one specific issue in our support system, that you can't access, so for now you'll have to make do with this video:

P.S. Famke Janssen is officially at the top of my "Future Wives Wishlist", especially if she's dressed as Jean Grey from X-Men. Mmmm, tasty goodness.

P.P.S. This should really have gone in Dan's blog as he did the hack, but he's still not got round to setting it up. Grr!