How to GUARANTEE a ticket cannot get forgotten until questions in it are answered?

[Eiren Smith]

I often ask others on my team questions in a ticket. Or ask them to provide files, etc. If this is in a ticket that's part of the active development project, these are easy to not forget.

But frequently I do this in tickets that are not yet part of the current project. What are different ways other folks accomplish the following:

• Make sure I cannot forget about those tickets until the questions are answered (or files provided, etc.)
• Have it show up for the user I'm asking the question of persistently. I envision some kind of list for this that each user can check. Where the user only sees things someone is waiting on him to respond to.
• I'd like to be able to put this on the list of multiple specific users sometimes. Not just a single user every time.
• User could claim (through a ticket status change or a field value change in the ticket) that he's provided all the data needed).

I thought of a custom field with values like "Waiting on Data", "Needs More Files", etc. Okay, that's probably as good as it gets for that. But how to present these to each user in a way that they'll actually use. Something natural. I'd love it if it was some kind of sidebar showing in every board. So the user would be checking boards already (as users would live in the board for the current project) but if things were waiting for him (in that project or not), those would show up on that board's page too. So it'd be frequently in a user's face — unforgettable.

Maybe I need a ticket status of "Data Needed"? But I don't want this to require someone to put the ticket into the current project just to get that data.

Does Jira have an elegant solution for this?

Using Jira Cloud, not self-hosted.

Thanks!

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

you can't control this simply based upon comments or mentions. Personally, I would recommend that, if you have a hard requirement for an action, you add sub-tasks to the issue for each action. You could certainly have a custom file flag but if you have several actions then it really doesn't fit the bill.

[Eiren Smith]

Thanks. I plan to try sub-tasks for certain aspects of this.

I also discovered swim lanes when testing kanban boards in my Classic-type test project yesterday. Swimlanes could be very helpful for this in current project. For everything else, maybe I'll just create a kanban board for everything that's not in the current project and also use a swimlane in that "everything except current project" board for the things I don't want to forget.

I have not yet figured out a mechanism to ensure the answer is accepted by the originator of the question before the thing is put to bed when I use swimlanes for this, as in:

1. Question posed
2. Answer posed.
3. Answer accepted.

But sub-tasks seem like they would solve that quite well. So I'll look for the balance here and do things that way.