We all hate the telephone game and accountability is pretty important. This is enforced in a strong way from Alice in this Dilbert comic:
The thing is that there are a couple issues with E-Mail. The main thing is that it only resides in the inbox/outbox of the recipients/sender, preventing any normal person from taking a look at the conversation later on. You'll get the whole "oh there's a thread floating around I'll forward it to you" scenario.
Especially when an email is just between two people, you run the risk of some valuable communication being lost when both are not around for whatever reason that may occur.
Enter JIRA Comments. Having the conversation there provides a couple things. It's a public forum so people tend to be a bit nicer there. It's query-able, as all Issue fields are, and they persist so long as nobody deleted the issue.
There's this nifty @mention feature that you can use to direct a comment at someone. This provides a notification to someone (usually in the form of a an email) with the comment. However, this adds the context of the JIRA issue and the rest of the conversation. Some annoyances from this feature comes when you're in a thread with multiple people and you want to ensure that everyone gets a notification. In this situation, Watch Feature can be used to then keep up with the conversation as well as other changes.
After I wrote up all that (and most of the next post) I stumbled upon this blog post by +Dan Radigan that concisely describes using @mentions and Watchers effectively. In addition, it also has some nifty queries to help people find posts that they were mentioned in as well. Definitely check it out.
This post is getting long and I want to talk about how @mentions only allow you to notify one person at a time. Wouldn't it be nice to quickly and easily notify a bunch of people at once? Well, as of this post, JIRA doesn't support that, but there's a pretty nice workaround. I'll get to that next time.
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