Twice a week we review the list of outstanding trouble tickets with our customers. Our help desk assists with getting the team prepared for this meeting. So the help desk produces a daily list of all open trouble tickets. This list has a minimal set of information like the priority of the problem, which team it is assigned to, which developer is working the problem, etc.
Our customer performs a similar roll up of trouble ticket information into their own spreadsheet format. Their summary is more detailed. When you print it out, it is hard to read the text. So you have to zoom in to read anything.
I have found these aids somewhat beneficial when assessing where we are with all known issues in our applications. However the list is just a start. I have found that you need to use the list to determine which issues you need to do some homework on. If you are not familiar with the problems, and you don't know where we are in the resolution process, having the list by itself is useless.
Somehow I wish we could get a list that is more dynamic. I suspect our defect tracking system can do this. We just have to set it up. Might require generation of a custom report. But the advantage would be that, every time you ran this report, you would have the most up to date information. This could be worth doing.
