Reduce duplicate bug tickets in your backlog, make your tech team love you.

When your bug backlog is already massive, the last thing you need is duplicate tickets.

The Intalayer team have talked with hundreds of product and engineering teams in tech companies of all sizes and 60% experience problems with duplicate bug tickets.

Why do duplicate bug tickets matter?

Ticket duplication significantly impacts the effectiveness of product, engineering and customer support teams:

• Product managers are unable to quickly and correctly determine the volume, frequency and ultimate priority of bugs.
• Engineering teams lose confidence in the process and lack the accurate evidence to fully understand and solve bug problems.
• When engineering teams respond to one ticket, they can't update all the duplicates. This means time consuming workarounds that detract attention from further customer needs, reducing the speed of service customer support can provide.
• Due to lack of confidence in the priority of reported bugs and expected resolution times, support teams are unable to provide transparency to customers and set clear expectations of when their issues will be resolved.

Why do duplicates occur?

Support teams are almost always under time pressure, especially in scaling companies. Support teams are monitored on speed of response, number of tickets responded to and volume levels waiting in the support queue, so support team members won't always be able to follow processes, and report bugs to the best quality to ensure that duplicates are minimised.

When reporting a bug in Jira, the most simple action to take to find similar issues is by searching. However, Jira search is notoriously ineffective with long load times and inconsistent matching. These failures increase the chances that support teams will create duplicate tickets.

How can you solve this now?

Most current approaches to avoid the issue of duplicates require process and behaviour change or the use of existing tools that have proven unsuitable.

1. Jira search is notoriously ineffective so simply searching for duplicates before entering your ticket into Jira in most cases won't work.
2. To make Jira tickets discoverable, you need strict and consistent naming criteria for bugs. For example, a bug related to the login page could be called "LOGIN PAGE BUG: User cannot login". This is hard to implement at scale across multiple teams, languages, levels of bug complexity and with increasing bug volumes.
3. Tagging bugs into themes can help reduce the amount of tickets a user needs to search to find a duplicate. Taking the example above, the user login error could be tagged with a "LOGIN PAGE" tag. But what happens if it is tagged as "User Error" because of...user error.

Despite seeing many attempts of the above, including extensive spreadsheets, solutions are never accurate or fully adopted by teams.

The Intalayer solution

To solve this in an automated, consistent and accurate way, Intalayer is developing a unique matching algorithm to enable easy discovery and prevention of duplicates tickets. We integrate seamlessly with your existing tools and look beyond ineffective keyword matching to ensure that duplicates are no longer an issue for your team.

Reducing duplicates and correctly grouping related bugs means your engineering team gets more context of the problem, helping to resolve important bugs faster. Product Managers can see the volume of requests and determine priority more easily and customer support teams can provide more transparency to customers. Reducing duplicates means better outcomes for your teams and customers.

Find out more about Intalayer

Intalayer is an intelligent infrastructure layer that enhances your existing workflow and tool set. We are gradually opening up early access to engineering and product teams who want to automate bug management processes.

You can sign up for product details, release updates and request early access below.