Development teams live and die by the almighty ticket. It doesn’t matter what tooling, system, or framework you’re using—Jira, Asana, or another project management tool—for a team to get anything done effectively, every ticket must be clear, appropriately detailed, accurate, and understandable. Learning how to write a good ticket is essential for keeping projects on track.
This is easy enough when you have someone on staff, like a product owner or digital project manager, who has the expertise to understand and communicate ticket requirements to a development team or external agency. It gets much, much trickier when you don’t. But here’s a little secret: there’s a pretty easy formula for writing the perfect ticket, and you don’t need to be a product expert to do it.
Why Good Requirements Are Important
Solid requirements ensure that everyone understands what needs to be done, what doesn’t, and how everyone will know and agree that the ticket is complete and ready to ship. Clear ticket requirements eliminate ambiguity, ultimately saving time and money.
Provide clear shared expectations
Shared is the key word here. Both the requestor and the development team need to understand exactly what the issue is and what resolution(s) will be acceptable. This is the heart of writing effective user stories and agile ticket writing best practices.
Define scope
Scope creep – it’s not just for projects! Let’s say the design team asks for the styling of a component heading to be updated on one page, but that component is used on several other pages, as well.
Given that, the ticket needs to be very clear about the scope of the update. Is the component using shared code? Will updating it on page A update it on pages B, C, and D, as well – and is that desired? Should we update page A today and pages B-D later? Defining scope is critical when writing Jira tickets or user stories for Scrum teams.
Identify gaps and questions
Formally defining expectations and scope within the ticket also helps to identify important details that are missing before development begins, avoiding a costly back-and-forth between the requestor and the development team. This can include simple but critical info like what URLs to link for the new CTA buttons being added to a page.
Solid requirements often help to identify broader dependencies or projects that should or must be completed. For example, if the request is to add a Product schema to product pages, the development team will need to come up with a way to manage the necessary data for that schema first.
Parts of Perfect Ticket
A perfect Jira ticket or task in Asana gives the development team all of the necessary info – the who, what, where, and how – without anything extraneous that could leave room for ambiguity.
1. Who
This is two-fold: 1) who is requesting, so the team knows who to contact with questions or concerns, and 2) who is affected by the issue reported in the ticket.
For #2, be sure to be specific. Does the issue only affect users logging into the app for the first time, or any user? Is it only occurring for users in a specific location?
2. What
What exactly is occurring and what is the ticket for? This is the core requirement. Spell out what is happening and what needs to happen in clear, actionable language.
This can be incredibly simple – if a page that should be available is throwing a 404 error, the “what” is “The page should display correctly and not result in a 404 error.”
Screenshots and Looms are incredibly helpful for showing specific visual issues, like cut-off items or jumping content.
3. Where
Where does the issue occur? Ensure you’ve provided details on the specific page and section, as well as the environment(s) and device(s) where the issue is occurring. Tools like What Is My Browser can help you find and share identifying details for your device. At the very least, be sure to indicate if the issue occurs on desktop, tablet, and/or mobile.
4. How
How should the work be done? This isn’t about micromanaging the solution, but about giving enough context for the team to make the right decisions.
5. Acceptance Criteria
Acceptance criteria are the agreed-upon end result for this ticket, and how we know it’s ready to be released. In Agile, this is known as the “definition of done.”
The acceptance criteria can be used by anyone and everyone responsible for approving the ticket – project manager, QA team, stakeholders – to ensure that the ticket requirements have been met.
Bringing It All Together
A ticket that covers who, what, where, and how and defines acceptance criteria eliminates ambiguity and makes it easy for teams to take action. Bringing it all together:
❌ Bad Ticket
The About menu is broken on mobile. Please fix.
✅ Good Ticket
As verified on Pixel Pro 9 with Android v16 in Chrome and iPhone 16 using Chrome, the About menu item does not open when tapped on mobile. This issue occurs on production for all users.
Acceptance Criteria
- On mobile devices, tapping the About menu item opens the About submenu
By investing a little extra time upfront in writing clear Jira tickets or Asana tasks, you’ll save your team hours of rework, reduce frustration, and increase the odds of getting exactly what you asked for the first time. In short, a well-written ticket is the roadmap to project success.