Custom Fields - Detected In Field

This is a first in a series of small short suggestions on stuff you might want to track in your issue tracer.

One of the important ways to measure effectiveness of your quality effort is to understand the ratio of issues detected in the field (versus the whole issue count).

To track this, add a custom field that will be True/Checked whenever an issue ORIGINATED in the field. Note you should NOT include issues which were detected internally, waved thru by PM decision, and later detected/experienced by someone in the field. This is a different type of issue which doesn't reflect on the quality of your "detection" effort, but more on the quality of your decision making process.

An alternative to this simple field is to provide a link to a trouble ticket in some CRM system, and to decide only to do the link when the issue originated in the field. Of course a reverse link from the CRM to the issue is always recommended both for those that originated in the field and those that were detected internally.