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

Obsessing over ticket velocity misses the point, but benchmarks may exist.

Why Tickets/Week Isn't Everything

Raw count is misleading:

• 20 trivial bugs ≠ 3 complex tasks
• Story points matter more than ticket count (baseline: 5-10 pts/engineer per 2-week sprint)
• True throughput = completed tickets/week with quality + reasonable cycle time

Reality check: 1 ticket/day (5/week) is a sustainable pace; spikes to 10+ during bug triage weeks are normal but unsustainable.

DevOps-specific: Infrastructure tickets may take longer especially if there is more than one team involved in decision making.

What Drives Higher Throughput

1. Ticket Sizing (The Goldilocks Rule)

Too Big (>1 week): Split → Epic → Stories → Tasks
Too Small (<4 hours): Batch into 1-day tickets
Just Right: 1-3 days each → 2-5/week sustainable

Teams breaking work into 1-day tasks can hit 25 tickets/week/team.

2. Workflow Hygiene

• WIP limit: Keep "In Progress" <5 tickets
• Cycle time: Target <7 days per ticket
• Automation: CI/lint/tests cut review time by 50%

3. Context Switching Tax

Juggling 3+ tickets/day wastes 40% of productivity. Focus deeply on 1-2 at a time.

Red Flags vs. Green Flags

Red Flags

Low velocity (<3/week):

• Oversized tickets (not broken down)
• Blocked >3 days consistently
• Poor estimation skills

High but fragile (>12/week):

• Bug-only work (tech debt accumulating)
• Skipping tests/reviews
• Burnout risk

Green Flags

5-8 quality tickets/week + deploy frequency >weekly + low rework rate = healthy velocity.

Jira Native Metrics

• Velocity Chart: Average completed points/week
• Control Chart: Cycle time trends
• Burndown: Sprint commitment tracking

The Bottom Line

Good engineers optimize for impactful velocity (deployed value/week), not raw ticket count.

What matters more:

• Are you shipping features or just closing tickets?
• Is your cycle time improving?
• Are you reducing blockers quarter over quarter?

Focus on sustainable throughput with quality—not vanity metrics.

I took a look on scrum.org to elaborate my thoughts on this : https://www.scrum.org/scrum-kanban
https://www.scrum.org/forum/scrum-forum/31862/story-points-complexity-vs-effort