How Many Jira Tickets Does a 'Good' Engineer Close Per Week?

Source: Dev.to

Overview

Obsessing over ticket velocity misses the point, but benchmarks can still be useful. Raw ticket counts are misleading because the effort required for each ticket varies widely.

Benchmarks

• Baseline: 5–10 story points per engineer per 2‑week sprint.
• Sustainable pace: ~1 ticket per day (≈5 tickets per week).
• Spikes: 10+ tickets during bug‑triage weeks are normal but unsustainable.
• High‑velocity teams: Breaking work into 1‑day tasks can reach 25 tickets per week per team.

Factors Affecting Velocity

• Ticket complexity: 20 trivial bugs ≠ 3 complex tasks.
• Work‑in‑Progress (WIP) limit: Keep “In Progress” limited to 1 week.
• Breakdown: Split work into an Epic → Stories → Tasks.

Velocity Ranges

• Low (< 3 tickets/week) – poor estimation, short (≈3 days) cycles.
• Healthy (5–8) – quality tickets, deploy frequency > weekly, low rework rate.
• High but fragile (> 12) – mostly bug‑only work, accumulating tech debt, skipping tests/reviews, burnout risk.

Metrics to Track

• Velocity Chart – average completed story points per week.
• Control Chart – cycle‑time trends.
• Burndown Chart – sprint commitment tracking.

Recommendations

• Optimize for impactful velocity (deployed value per week) rather than raw ticket count.
• Ask:
  • Are you shipping features or just closing tickets?
  • Is your cycle time improving?
  • Are blockers decreasing quarter over quarter?
• Aim for sustainable throughput with quality, not vanity metrics.

References

• Scrum.org – Scrum Kanban
• Scrum.org Forum – Story points: complexity vs. effort