Aaron,

In JIRA and a few other systems, there is a "vote" feature. If used with an agile schema, it seems to me that you could use it to tally the number of times an unaddressed story might address a real instance of a user need. We do something else though.

We use different projects (in JIRA) to track different forms of contacts / needs for some of our projects that have high patron support / patron contacts. One queue is used to track support requests and feedbacks; these then spawn the creation of a new ticket in an engineering queue for work (stories, bug fixes, technical tasks) to be done by the dev team. If a new patron feedback comes in that is already represented by a story (or bug) in the dev queue, we link them. Dev tickets that link to multiple customer feedback tickets essentially have multiple "votes". 

In addition to help weighting the stories, this approach also lets us 1) keep track of testing and acceptance criteria (i.e., did we actually address the original request from a patron), and 2.) contact patrons / issue submitters after we release a feature or bug fix, to let them know our most recent release addresses their issue (sometimes months or years after the fact). 

HTH, 

- Tom


On Mar 6, 2014, at 6:54 AM, Collie, Aaron wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Pardon my ignorance here, but we were discussing use cases and user stories and noting how static they are (in our implementation of them) for capturing user needs for more general library services. Im my experience, there is one story per need, and additional expressions of that particular need don't really get "counted" to assist with prioritization.
> 
> I'm curious if anyone has used any sort of ticketing system for a more traditional library function like reference or instruction that might "tally" expressions of need (e.g. we've heard a request for an NVIVO course 4 times in the last semester). Maybe something like Agile or Kanban already account for accumulation of stories or prioritization based on stats, and I'm just not aware of it?
> 
> -Aaron
> 
> 
> W. Aaron Collie
> Digital Curation Librarian
> MSU Libraries
> tel: 517.884.0867 email: [log in to unmask]
> tweet: aaroncollie site: http://staff.lib.msu.edu/collie/