What is a ticket, and how do you label one?
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What a ticket is
A ticket is one piece of work, written down so it isn't lost. It usually has a short title, a description of what's wrong or what's wanted, and a conversation underneath where people add detail. Different tools call them different things: issues, tasks, stories, bugs. They're all tickets.
A team's full list of tickets that nobody has started yet is its backlog. Most teams have more tickets than time, so the backlog keeps growing. BacklogBeast is named after it.
Where tickets live
Tickets live in an issue tracker. Two you'll often see in software teams:
- GitHub Issues sit next to the code, in the same repository. Each issue has a number, such as #42, and anyone with access to the repository can open one.
- Linear is a separate planning tool. Its issues have team-prefixed ids, such as ENG-42, and are grouped into teams, cycles and projects.
Jira, Asana and others work the same way. The ideas on this page carry over.
What a label is
A label is a short coloured tag on a ticket, such as bug, docs or billing. A ticket can have several. People use labels to filter the backlog ("show me every open bug"), and tools use them as signals ("anything labelled agent-ready is mine to pick up").
Labels are cheap to add and remove, and adding or removing one never changes the ticket's text. That makes a label a good on/off switch for handing work to someone, or to something.
Labelling a GitHub issue
Here's a repository's issue list. Labels show as coloured chips after each title, so you can see at a glance which tickets are bugs and which are queued for the agent.
agent-ready labels mark two tickets for the agent.Recreation of GitHub's issue list in its dark theme. Example repository and names.To add a label to one issue:
- Open the issue.
- In the right-hand sidebar, click Labels.
- Tick the label you want, or type to find it. The change is saved when you close the menu.
Trim spaces in discount codes #42
● OpenWhere: checkout page, discount code field.
Now: " SAVE10 " (pasted with spaces) is rejected as "Invalid code".
Expected: spaces are trimmed first, so it applies SAVE10.
Assignees
No one assignedLabels⚙
Projects
None yetagent-ready ticked.Recreation of GitHub's issue page in its dark theme.To label several at once, tick them in the issue list and use the Label menu above the list. To create a new label, open Issues → Labels → New label and give it a name, a colour and, if you like, a short description. GitHub's guide to managing labels has the details.
Labels in Linear
Linear shows labels the same way: a small chip with a coloured dot, next to each issue in a list.
To add a label to a Linear issue, open it and click Labels in the right-hand panel, or press L. Then pick one or type to search. Labels can belong to the whole workspace or to one team. Linear's guide to labels covers label groups and creating new ones.
Trim spaces in discount codes
Where: checkout page, discount code field.
Now: " SAVE10 " (pasted with spaces) is rejected as "Invalid code".
Expected: spaces are trimmed first, so it applies SAVE10.
The label BacklogBeast watches
BacklogBeast works from GitHub issues. When you connect a repository, you choose the label it watches for. In these examples it's agent-ready. From then on:
- Adding the label hands the ticket over. BacklogBeast first checks the ticket is clear enough, then works on it and leaves a draft pull request.
- An unclear ticket is sent back. BacklogBeast removes the label and adds a comment saying what's missing. Putting the label back is always a person's call.
Anyone who can label issues in the repository can hand work over. People who only write and label tickets don't need a BacklogBeast seat. If you'd like to try it on your own repository, join the waitlist.