Make Unplanned Work Visible in JIRA

It is Monday morning and your team has just wrapped up Sprint Planning. Everyone is fired up and ready to crush the sprint goal.

Fast forward to the next day and things take an unexpected turn. Your teammate’s laptop is out of commission because his cat decided to use it as a litter box. Now they are stuck reinstalling everything from scratch. Rest in peace, productivity.

Then a critical bug pops up. It should be a quick fix, but surprise, there is no local test data to reproduce the issue. What was supposed to be a fast resolution turns into an all-day setup nightmare.

Just when you think things are back on track, a high-priority production incident appears out of nowhere. Suddenly you are pulled away from your planned work, scrambling to address it.

Sound familiar? These kinds of disruptions can pile up quickly. Emergencies and invisible work do more than drain productivity. They slow down momentum and make it harder to deliver on your commitments. Without visibility into these interruptions, sprint predictability goes out the window.

That is why transparency matters. It is not just about keeping stakeholders informed. It helps you spot patterns, identify where the team’s time is getting lost, and find ways to prevent similar disruptions in future sprints.

But let us be honest. Logging unexpected work into JIRA is no one’s favorite task. It forces engineers to break their focus, open JIRA, navigate through forms, and fill out all the required fields. It is tedious, which is why it often gets skipped.

So I tried a different approach. I built a CLI assistant that lets me create tickets directly from the terminal without ever opening a browser. It has saved me time and made staying on top of tasks much easier.

I would love for you to check it out and share your thoughts. Feedback is always welcome.

Until next time, keep learning!