Write a ticket somebody else could pick up cold, and have them try

short · 35 min · Objective 4.1

Task

Write a complete ticket for a real fault, then hand it to somebody else -- or to yourself a week later -- and record every question they had to ask. Those questions are the fields your ticket was missing, and they are the entire output of this lab.

Steps

  1. Write lab/ticket/ticket.md with the full field set: contact, device, time of occurrence, reproducible, description in both the user's words and your observations, category and severity.
  2. Work the fault, writing progress notes as you go in lab/ticket/notes.csv with header time,tried,result,eliminated,undone -- one row per attempt, including the ones that changed nothing.
  3. Write the resolution in lab/ticket/resolution.md with cause, what you did, how you verified, anything left changed, and what would prevent it.
  4. Hand it to a second reader cold, and record every question they had to ask in lab/ticket/questions.md.
  5. Write lab/ticket/escalation.md as the handover you would send if this needed escalating, marking belief as belief and naming what travels with it.

Verify

grep -Eic 'contact|device|severity|reproducible' lab/ticket/ticket.md
grep -Eic 'user said|reported:|in their words' lab/ticket/ticket.md
awk -F, 'NR>1 && NF>=5 {n++} END {print n" attempt(s) logged"}' lab/ticket/notes.csv
awk -F, 'NR>1 && $3 ~ /no change|nothing|unchanged/ {n++} END {print n" negative result(s)"}' lab/ticket/notes.csv
grep -Eic 'cause|verified' lab/ticket/resolution.md
grep -Ec '^[-*0-9]' lab/ticket/questions.md

Four ticket fields present, the user's own words quoted, five attempts logged including at least one negative result, and a questions list. Negative results are the most valuable content in a ticket and the first thing people leave out.

Notes

If the second reader had no questions at all, they did not read it cold. The questions are the deliverable; a ticket that produces none has usually been read by someone who already knew the answer.

This is an independent study companion for CompTIA A+ Core 2 220-1202 and is not produced by or endorsed by CompTIA.