Having been almost a month gone from Zimbra (aka Telligent), I'm starting to remember and notice some things that I've previously taken for granted.

One of the axioms that was drilled into me in my early days at Telligent was "no ticket, no work". Which is to say, if it's not work that's been defined and entered into the backlog and approved for work and ready to be tracked, then don't do it. There are several benefits to this approach. One is that it tends to address gold-plating and adhoc features (since I have to take the time to think about something and communicate it to the team).

But one of the things about this approach that I definitely took for granted was how this helps with tracking. For every commit I did to source control, I had to put the ticket number in the commit message. The tracking system we were using just happened to have the ability to integrate with source control, which was nice. But even if it didn't, as long as I know the ticket number, I could very easily search the commit logs and see what code changes were made for the ticket in question. This made code reviews, retrospectives, conflicts, documentation, bug fixes, etc so much easier.

It doesn't cost you but a few seconds to put the ticket number in your commit message, and a few more seconds to put in a decent commit description while you're at it.