Working together on a ticket

Comments and files, watching and voting, who else has a ticket open, sub-tasks, links between tickets and logging time.

A ticket is where the people working on something meet. This page covers what a ticket's page offers beyond its fields: the conversation, who follows it, what sits under it and what links to it, and the time spent on it. Creating and editing tickets is on Tickets.

Comments and attachments

A comment may be restricted to a role or a group, or marked internal in a helpdesk project. Restricted comments are shown only to people who hold that role in the project or belong to that group; internal notes are hidden from customers. Project administrators read everything.

Add a comment at the bottom of the ticket. You can edit or delete your own comments; people who may edit tickets can edit anyone's. Every comment keeps its author and time, and edits are marked.

Attach files with Attach files on the ticket page. Files go straight from your browser to the installation's storage; the ticket page shows their name, size and uploader, and anyone who can see the ticket can download them. The attachments area is disabled until an administrator has configured storage.

Watching

Watch a ticket to be emailed about changes to it. Reporters and assignees watch automatically, and so is whoever created it. Mention somebody as @username in a description or a comment and they are told whether or not they watch. The watcher count shows on the Watch button, and the vote count beside it; see Voting.

Voting

Vote on a ticket says you want it done, and the count sits next to the button. Press it again to withdraw. As in Jira you cannot vote for a ticket you reported, so the reporter sees the count without a button. Votes imported from Jira come across with their tickets.

Who else is looking

While a ticket is open, its header shows who else has it open at that moment: their initials, their names and an eye. It is there so two people do not both pick up the same request, or both reply to the same comment. Someone with the ticket open in several tabs is listed once, and the list empties as pages close. Nothing is recorded: there is no history of who looked at what.

Customers count as looking, so a member sees when a customer is reading their request, but customers are never shown who is looking at theirs.

Sub-tasks and epics

A ticket can sit under another one. Sub-tasks break a piece of work into steps under their parent; an epic gathers the tickets that make up a larger piece of work. Both use the same relationship, so a ticket page shows what is under it and links back up to what it is under.

The panel lists the children with their status and assignee and counts how many are done, with a bar, and adds up the time logged across them, their estimates and, for those who see billing, the cost (see Effort and cost). Add sub-task raises a child with the parent already set, offering the project's sub-task types; on an epic it offers ordinary types instead and the panel is headed "Tickets in this epic". The button appears only if you may create tickets in the project and the project offers a suitable type.

On a board, a ticket with sub-tasks becomes a lane holding them. A parent must be a live ticket in the same project, and a ticket cannot be placed under itself or under one of its own children. Sub-task and epic relationships imported from Jira, including Jira's epic links, come across as this same relationship.

Relationships

• Parent and sub-tasks. A ticket may belong to a parent; sub-task types are made for this. Epics work the same way with their stories.
• Links relate tickets with typed relationships such as blocks, duplicates or relates to. The Links panel lists them from this ticket's side ("blocks WEB-12", "is blocked by WEB-9"). To add one, pick the relationship, type the other ticket's key and press Link; both tickets record it in their history. Anyone who may edit the ticket can add and remove links, and only tickets you can see are offered or shown.
• Remote links point at pages in other systems, such as a Confluence page or an issue in another Jira. They arrive with a Jira import and are listed under the ticket links with the relationship Jira recorded ("mentioned in"), the name of the other system and whether the remote item was resolved; the title opens the page in a new tab. Alba does not create remote links itself.

Logging time

The Activities panel on the ticket page is the ticket's share of time tracking: every activity labelled with the ticket's key, whoever logged it and wherever. Start now begins a running activity on the ticket, with its summary as the description, and stops whatever you had running; Stop ends it. Below the list is the same form as on the Activities page, without the project: an activity logged here is always on this ticket and in its project, and its labels never move it to another. Give it a description, the day, when it started and when it ended (or leave the end empty to start it running), labels and, under Note, a note. Entries show who logged them and when, your own can be edited or deleted in place, the ticket's total time spent adds up, and the history records each entry and every later change. When the ticket has a remaining estimate, logging time takes the time off it, stopping at zero rather than going negative; shortening or deleting an entry leaves the estimate alone. Logging needs the Comment and Log time permissions; customers see no activities on their requests.