Ticket
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A ticket is a single unit of work in a project management tool — it could be a bug to fix, a feature to build, or a task to complete. Each ticket has a title, description, assignee, and status. Jira, Linear, and GitHub Issues are all ticket systems.
Real Talk
A ticket is an item in a project tracking system that represents a discrete unit of work — bug report, feature request, task, or improvement. Tickets contain descriptions, acceptance criteria, priority, assignee, and status fields. They are the atomic unit of work in agile workflows.
When You'll Hear This
"Create a ticket for that bug before you forget." / "Link the PR to the ticket so we can trace the change."
Related Terms
Backlog
The backlog is the master to-do list for a product — every feature, bug, and idea that hasn't been built yet, prioritised by importance.
Epic
An epic is a big chunk of work that's too large to finish in one sprint, so it gets broken down into smaller user stories.
Issue
An issue is GitHub's word for a ticket — a filed report about a bug, feature request, or question.
Sprint
A sprint is a fixed time-box — usually 1-2 weeks — where a team commits to completing a specific set of tasks.
User Story
A user story is a tiny description of a feature from the user's perspective, written in plain English: 'As a user, I want to reset my password, so that I c...
WIP (Work In Progress)
Code that's not done yet. When you mark a PR as WIP, it means 'don't merge this — I'm still working on it.' It's like a 'wet paint' sign for your code.